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THE COMMON READER

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE VOYAGE OUT
NIGHT AND DAY
MONDAY OR TUESDAY
JACOB’S ROOM
MR. BENNETT AND MRS.
BROWN

MRS. DALLOWAY

The

COMMON READER

VIRGINIA WOOLF

. . I rejoice to concur with the common
reader; for by the common sense of readers,
uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the
refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of
learning, must be generally decided all claim to
poetical honours.” — Dr. Johnson, Life of Gray.

ew York

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QUINN a BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY. N. J.

TO

LYTTON STRACHEY

Some of these papers appeared originally in
the Times Literary Supplement and the Dial.
I have to thank the Editors for allowing me
to reprint them here; some are based upon
articles written for various newspapers, while
others appear now for the first time.

Contents

PAGE

The Common Reader . 11

The Pasxons and Chaucer . 13

On Not Knowing Greek . 39

The Elizabethan Lumber Room .... 61

Notes on an Elizabethan Play . 73

Montaigne . 87

The Duchess of Newcastle . 101

Rambling Round Evelyn . 113

Defoe . 125

Addison . 137

The Lives of the Obscure

I. The Taylors and the Edgeworths . . 154

II. Laetitia Pilkington . 168

III. Miss Ormerod . 175

Jane Austen . 191

Modern Fiction . 207

“Jane Eyre” and “Wutiiering Heights” . . . 219

. 229

George Eliot

[7]

CONTENTS

PAGE

The Russian Point of View . 243

Outlines —

I. Miss Mitford ....... . 257

II. Dr. Bentley . 266

III. Lady Dorothy Nevill . 274

IV. Archbishop Thomson . 280

The Patron and the Crocus . ■ . . . _ 287

The Modern Essay < . 293

Joseph Conrad ....... 309

How It Strikes a Contemporary .... 319

[8]

THE COMMON READER

The Common Reader

There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson’s Life of Gray
which might well be written up in all those rooms, too
humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where
the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people.
“ . . . I rejoice to concur with the common reader;
for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by
literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty
and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided
all claim to poetical honours.” It defines their quali¬
ties; it dignifies their aims; it bestows upon a pursuit
which devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to
leave behind it nothing very substantial, the sanction
of the great man’s approval.

The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs
from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated,
and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads
for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge
or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is
guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of
whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of
whole — a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a the¬
ory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he

[ii]

THE COMMON READER

reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric
which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of
looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affec¬
tion, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and
superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap
of old furniture without caring where he finds it or
of what nature it may be so long as it serves his pur¬
pose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic
are too obvious to be pointed out ; but if he has, as Dr.
Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution
of poetical honours, then, perhaps, it may be worth
while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions
which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so
mighty a result.

[12]

The Pas tons and Chaucer

The tower of Caister Castle still rises ninety feet
into the air, and the arch still stands from which Sir
John Fastolf’s barges sailed out to fetch stone for the
building of the great castle. But now jackdaws nest
on the tower, and of the castle, which once covered six
acres of ground, only ruined walls remain, pierced by
loop-holes and surmounted by battlements, though
there are neither archers within nor cannon without.
As for the “seven religious men” and the “seven poor
folk” who should, at this very moment, be praying
for the souls of Sir John and his parents, there is no
sign of them nor sound of their prayers. .The place is
a ruin. Antiquaries speculate and differ.

Not so very far off lie more ruins — the ruins of
Bromholm Priory, where John Paston was buried, nat¬
urally enough, since his house was only a mile or so
away, lying on low ground by the sea, twenty miles
north of Norwich. The coast is dangerous, and the
land, even in our time, inaccessible. Nevertheless the
little bit of wood at Bromholm, the fragment of the
true Cross, brought pilgrims incessantly to the Priory,
and sent them away with eyes opened and limbs
straightened. But some of them with their newly-
opened eyes saw a sight which shocked them — the
grave of John Paston in Bromholm Priory without a
1 The Paston Letters, edited by Dr. James Gairdner (1904), 4 vols.

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

tombstone. The news spread over the country-side.
The Pastons had fallen; they that had been so power¬
ful could no longer afford a stone to put above John
Paston’s head. Margaret, his widow, could not pay
her debts; the eldest son, Sir John, wasted his prop¬
erty upon women and tournaments, while the younger,
John also, though a man of greater parts, thought
more of his hawks than of his harvests.

The pilgrims of course were liars, as people whose
eyes have just been opened by a piece of the true Cross
have every right to be; but their news, none the less,
was welcome. The Pastons had risen in the world.
People said even that they had been bondmen not so
very long ago. At any rate, men still living could re¬
member John’s grandfather Clement tilling his own
land, a hard-working peasant; and William, Clement’s
son, becoming a judge and buying land; and John,
William’s son, marrying well and buying more land
and quite lately inheriting the vast new castle at Cais-
ter, and all Sir John’s lands in Norfolk and Suffolk.
People said that he had forged the old knight’s will.
What wonder, then, that he lacked a tombstone4? But,
if we consider the character of Sir John Paston, John’s
eldest son, and his upbringing and his surroundings,
and the relations between himself and his father as the
family letters reveal them, we shall see how difficult it
was, and how likely to be neglected — this business of
making his father’s tombstone.

For let us imagine, in-the most desolate part of Eng¬
land known to us at the present moment, a raw, new-

[14]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

built house, without telephone, bathroom, or drains,
arm-chairs or newspapers, and one shelf perhaps of
books, unwieldy to hold, expensive to come by. The
windows look out upon a few cultivated fields and a
dozen hovels, and beyond them there is the sea on one
side, on the other a vast fen. A single road crosses the
fen, but there is a hole in it, which, one of the farm
hands reports, is big enough to swallow a carriage.
And, the man adds, Tom Topcroft, the mad bricklayer,
has broken loose again and ranges the country half-
naked, threatening to kill any one who approaches him.
That is what they talk about at dinner in the desolate
house, while the chimney smokes horribly, and the
draught lifts the carpets on the floor. Orders are given
to lock all gates at sunset, and, when the long dismal
evening has worn itself away, simply and solemnly,
girt about with dangers as they are, these isolated men
and women fall upon their knees in prayer.

In the fifteenth century, however, the wild landscape
was broken suddenly and very strangely by vast piles
of brand-new masonry. There rose out of the sand¬
hills and heaths of the Norfolk coast a huge bulk of
stone, like a modern hotel in a watering-place; but
there was no parade, no lodging houses, and no pier at
Yarmouth then, and this gigantic building on the out¬
skirts of' the town was built to house one solitary old
gentleman without any children — Sir John Fastolf,
who had fought at Agincourt and acquired great
wealth. He had fought at Agincourt and got but lit¬
tle reward. No one took his advice. Men spoke ill

[15]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

of him behind his back. He was well aware of it; his
temper was none the sweeter for it. He was a hot-
tempered old man, powerful, embittered by a sense of
grievance. But whether on the battlefield or at court
he thought perpetually of Caister, and how, when his
duties allowed, he would settle down on his father’s
land and live in a great house of his own building.

The gigantic structure of Caister Castle was in
progress not so many miles away when the little Pas-
tons were children. John Paston, the father, had
charge of some part of the business, and the children
listened, as soon as they could listen at all, to talk of
stone and building, of barges gone to London and not
yet returned, of the twenty-six private chambers, of
the hall and chapel ; of foundations, measurements, and
rascally work-people. Later, in 1454, when the work
was finished and Sir John had come to spend his last
years at Caister, they may have seen for themselves
the mass of treasure that was stored there; the tables
laden with gold and silver plate; the wardrobes
stuffed with gowns of velvet and satin and cloth of
gold, with hoods and tippets and beaver hats and
leather jackets and velvet doublets; and how the very
pillow-cases on the beds were of green and purple silk.
There were tapestries everywhere. The beds were laid
and the bedrooms hung with tapestries representing
sieges, hunting and hawking, men fishing, archers
shooting, ladies playing on their harps, dallying with
ducks, or a giant “bearing the leg of a bear in his
hand”. Such were the fruits of a well-spent life. To

[16]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

buy land, to build great houses, to stuff these houses full
of gold and silver plate (though the privy might well
be in the bedroom), was the proper aim of mankind.
Mr. and Mrs. Paston spent the greater part of their
energies in the same exhausting occupation. For
since the passion to acquire was universal, one could
never rest secure in one’s possessions for long. The
outlying parts of one’s property were in perpetual
jeopardy. The Duke of Norfolk might covet this
manor, the Duke of Suffolk that. Some trumped-up
excuse, as for instance that the Pastons were bondmen,
gave them the right to seize the house and batter down
the lodges in the owner’s absence. And how could the
owner of Paston and Mauteby and Drayton and Gresh¬
am be in five or six places at once, especially now
that Caister Castle was his, and he must be in London
trying to get his rights recognised by the King? The
King was mad too, they said; did not know his own
child, they said ; or the King was in flight ; or there was
civil war in the land. Norfolk was always the most
distressed of counties and its country gentlemen the
most quarrelsome of mankind. Indeed, had Mrs. Pas¬
ton chosen, she could have told her children how when
she was a young woman a thousand men with bows and
arrows and pans of burning fire had marched upon
Gresham and broken the gates and mined the walls
of the room where she sat alone. But much worse
things than that had happened to women. She neither
bewailed her lot nor thought herself a heroine. The
long, long letters which she wrote so laboriously in her

[17]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

clear cramped hand to her husband, who was (as
usual) away, make no mention of herself. The sheep
had wasted the hay. Heyden’s and Tuddenham’s men
were out. A dyke had been broken and a bullock
stolen. They needed treacle badly, and really she must
have stuff for a dress.

But Mrs. Paston did not talk about herself.

Thus the little Pastons would see their mother writ¬
ing or dictating page after page, hour after hour, long,
long letters, but to interrupt a parent who writes so
laboriously of such important matters would have been
a sin. The prattle of children, the lore of the nursery
or schoolroom, did not find its way into these elaborate
communications. For the most part her letters are the
letters of an honest bailiff to his master, explaining,
asking advice, giving news, rendering accounts. There
was robbery and manslaughter; it was difficult to get
in the rents; Richard Calle had gathered but little
money ; and what with one thing and another Margaret
had not had time to make out, as she should have done,
the inventory of the goods which her husband desired.
Well might old Agnes, surveying her son’s affairs
rather grimly from a distance, counsel him to contrive
it so that “ye may have less to do in the world; your
father said, In little business lieth much rest. This
world is but a thoroughfare, and full of woe ; and when
we depart therefrom, right nought bear with us but
our good deeds and ill.”

The thought of death would thus come upon them
in a clap. Old Fastolf, cumbered with wealth and

[18]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

property, had his vision at the end of Hell fire, and
shrieked aloud to his executors to distribute alms, and
see that prayers were said “in perpetuum”, so that his
soul might escape the agonies of purgatory. William
Paston, the judge, was urgent too that the monks of
Norwich should be retained to pray for his soul “for
ever”. The soul was no wisp of air, but a solid body
capable of eternal suffering, and the fire that destroyed
it was as fierce as any that burnt on mortal grates. For
ever there would be monks and the town of Norwich,
and for ever the Chapel of Our Lady in the town of
Norwich. There was something matter-of-fact, posi¬
tive, and enduring in their conception both of life and
of death.

With the plan of existence so vigorously marked
out, children of course were well beaten, and boys and
girls taught to know their places. They must acquire
land; but they must obey their parents. A mother
would clout her daughter’s head three times a week and
break the skin if she did not conform to the laws of
behaviour. Agnes Paston, a lady of birth and breed¬
ing, beat her daughter Elizabeth. Margaret Paston,
a softer-hearted woman, turned her daughter out of
the house for loving the honest bailiff Richard Calle.
Brothers would not suffer their sisters to marry be¬
neath them, and “sell candle and mustard in Framling-
ham”. The fathers quarrelled with the sons, and the
mothers, fonder of their boys than of their girls, yet
bound by all law and custom to obey their husbands,
were torn asunder in their efforts to keep the peace.

[19]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

With all her pains, Margaret failed to prevent rash
acts on the part of her eldest son John, or the bitter
words with which his father denounced him. He was
a “drone among bees”, the father burst out, “which
labour for gathering honey in the fields, and the drone
doth naught but taketh his part of it”. He treated
his parents with insolence, and yet was fit for no charge
of responsibility abroad.

But the quarrel was ended, very shortly, by the
death (22nd May 1466) of John Paston, the father,
in London. The body was brought down to Bromholm
to be buried. Twelve poor men trudged all the way
bearing torches beside it. Alms were distributed;
masses and dirges were said. Bells were rung.
Great quantities of fowls, sheep, pigs, eggs, bread, and
cream were devoured, ale and wine drunk, and candles
burnt. Two panes were taken from the church win¬
dows to let out the reek of the torches. Black cloth
was distributed, and a light set burning on the grave.
But John Paston, the heir, delayed to make his fa¬
ther’s tombstone.

He was a young man, something over twenty-four
years of age. The discipline and the drudgery of a
country life bored him. When he ran away from home,
it was, apparently, to attempt to enter the King’s
household. Whatever doubts, indeed, might be cast
by their enemies on the blood of the Pastons, Sir John
was unmistakably a gentleman. He had inherited his
lands; the honey was his that the bees had gathered
with so much labour. He had the instincts of enjoy-

[20]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

ment rather than of acquisition, and with his mother’s
parsimony was strangely mixed something of his fa¬
ther’s ambition. Yet his own indolent and luxurious
temperament took the edge from both. He was attrac¬
tive to women, liked society and tournaments, and
court life and making bets, and sometimes, even, read¬
ing books. And so life, now that John Paston was
buried, started afresh upon rather a different founda¬
tion. There could be little outward change indeed.
Margaret still ruled the house. She still ordered the
lives of the younger children as she had ordered the
lives of the elder. The boys still needed to be beaten
into book-learning by their tutors, the girls still loved
the wrong men and must be married to the right.
Rents had to be collected ; the interminable lawsuit for
the Fastolf property dragged on. Battles were fought;
the roses of York and Lancaster alternately faded and
flourished. Norfolk was full of poor people seeking
redress for their grievances, and Margaret worked for
her son as she had worked for her husband, with this
significant change only, that now, instead of confiding
in her husband, she took the advice of her priest.

But inwardly there was a change. It seems at last
as if the hard outer shell had served its purpose and
something sensitive, appreciative, and pleasure-loving
had formed within. At any rate Sir John, writing to
his brother John at home, strayed sometimes from the
business on hand to crack a joke, to send a piece of
gossip, or to instruct him, knowingly and even subtly,
upon the conduct of a love affair. Be “as lowly to the

[21]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

mother as ye list, but to the maid not too lowly, nor
that ye be too glad to speed, nor too sorry to fail. And
I shall always be your herald both here, if she come
hither, and at home, when I come home, which I hope
hastily within XI. days at the furthest.” And then a
hawk was to be bought, a hat, or new silk laces sent
down to John in Norfolk, prosecuting his suit flying
his hawks, and attending with considerable energy and
not too nice a sense of honesty to the affairs of the Pas-
ton estates.

The lights had long since burnt out on John Paston’s
grave. But still Sir John delayed; no tomb replaced
them. He had his excuses ; what with the business of
the lawsuit, and his duties at Court, and the disturb¬
ance of the civil wars, his time was occupied and his
money spent. But perhaps something strange had hap¬
pened to Sir John himself, and not only to Sir John
dallying in London, but to his sister Margery falling
in love with the bailiff, and to Walter making Latin
verses at Eton, and to John flying his hawks at Paston.
Life was a little more various in its pleasures. They
were not quite so sure as the elder generation had been
of the rights of man and of the dues of God, of the
horrors of death, and of the importance of tombstones.
Poor Margaret Paston scented the change and sought
uneasily, with the pen which had marched so stiffly
through so many pages, to lay bare the root of her
troubles. It was not that the lawsuit saddened her;
she was ready to defend Caister with her own hands if
need be, “though I cannot well guide nor rule soldiers”,

[22]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

but there was something wrong with the family since
the death of her husband and master. Perhaps her son
had failed in his service to God ; he had been too proud
or too lavish in his expenditure; or perhaps he had
shown too little mercy to the poor. Whatever the fault
might be, she only knew that Sir John spent twice as
much money as his father for less result; that they
could scarcely pay their debts without selling land,
wood, or household stuff (“It is a death to me to think
if it”); while every day people spoke ill of them in
the country because they left John Paston to lie with¬
out a tombstone. The money that might have bought
it, or more land, and more goblets and more tapestry,
was spent by Sir John on clocks and trinkets, and upon
paying a clerk to copy out Treatises upon Knighthood
and other such stuff. There they stood at Paston —
eleven volumes, with the poems of Lydgate and Chau¬
cer among them, diffusing a strange air into the gaunt,
comfortless house, inviting men to indolence and van¬
ity, distracting their thoughts from business, and lead¬
ing them not only to neglect their own profit but to
think lightly of the sacred dues of the dead.

For sometimes, instead of riding off on his horse to
inspect his crops or bargain with his tenants, Sir John
would sit, in broad daylight, reading. There, on the
hard chair in the comfortless room with the wind lift¬
ing the carpet and the smoke stinging his eyes, he would
sit reading Chaucer, wasting his time, dreaming — or
what strange intoxication was it that he drew from
books*? Life was rough, cheerless, and disappointing.

[23]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

A whole year of days would pass fruitlessly in dreary
business, like dashes of rain on the window pane.
There was no reason in it as there had been for his
father; no imperative need to establish a family and
acquire an important position for children who were
not born, or if born, had no right to bear their father’s
name. But Lydgate’s poems or Chaucer’s, like a mirror
in which figures move brightly, silently, and com¬
pactly, showed him the very skies, fields, and people
whom he knew, but rounded and complete. Instead of
waiting listlessly for news from London or piecing out
from his mother’s gossip some country tragedy of love
and jealousy, here, in a few pages, the whole story was
laid before him. And then as he rode or sat at table
he would remember some description or saying which
bore upon the present moment and fixed it, or some
string of words would charm him, and putting aside
the pressure of the moment, he would hasten home to
sit in his chair and learn the end of the story.

To learn the end of the story — Chaucer can still
make us wish to do that. He has pre-eminently that
story-teller’s gift, which is almost the rarest gift among
writers at the present day. Nothing happens to us as
it did to our ancestors; events are seldom important;
if we recount them, we do not really believe in them;
we have perhaps things of greater interest to say, and
for these reasons natural story-tellers like Mr. Garnett,
whom we must distinguish from self-conscious story-

[24]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

tellers like Mr. Masefield, have become rare. For the
story-teller, besides his indescribable zest for facts,
must tell his story craftily, without undue stress or
excitement, or we shall swallow it whole and jumble
the parts together; he must let us stop, give us time
to think and look about us, yet always be persuading
us to move on. Chaucer was helped to this to some
extent by the time of his birth ; and in addition he had
another advantage over the moderns which will never
come the way of English poets again. England was
an unspoilt country. His eyes rested on a virgin land,
ail unbroken grass and wood except for the small towns
and an occasional castle in the building. No villa
roofs peered through Kentish tree-tops; no factory
chimney smoked on the hillside. The state of the
country, considering how poets go to Nature, how they
use her for their images and their contrasts even when
they do not describe her directly, is a matter of some
importance. Her cultivation or her savagery influ¬
ences the poet far more profoundly than the prose
writer. To the modem poet, with Birmingham, Man¬
chester, and London the size they are, the country is
the sanctuary of moral excellence in contrast with the
town which is the sink of vice. It is a retreat, the
haunt of modesty and virtue, where men go to hide and
moralise. There is something morbid, as if shrinking
from human contact, in the nature worship of Words¬
worth, still more in the microscopic devotion which
Tennyson lavished upon the petals of roses and the
buds of lime trees. But these were great poets. In

[25]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

their hands, the country was no mere jeweller’s shop,
or museum of curious objects to be described, even more
curiously, in words. Poets of smaller gift, since the
view is so much spoilt, and the garden or the meadow
must replace the barren heath and the precipitous
mountain-side, are now confined to little landscapes,
to birds’ nests, to acorns with every wrinkle drawn to
the life. The wider landscape is lost.

But to Chaucer the country was too large and too
wild to be altogether agreeable. He turned instinc¬
tively, as if he had painful experience of their nature,
from tempests and rocks to the bright May day and
the jocund landscape, from the harsh and mysterious
to the gay and definite. Without possessing a tithe
of the virtuosity in word-painting which is the modern
inheritance, he could give, in a few words, or even,
when we come to look, without a single word of direct
description, the sense of the open air.

And se the fresshe floures how they sprynge
— that is enough.

Nature, uncompromising, untamed, was no looking-
glass for happy faces, or confessor of unhappy souls.
She was herself; sometimes, therefore, disagreeable
enough and plain, but always in Chaucer’s pages with
the hardness and the freshness of an actual presence.
Soon, however, we notice something of greater impor¬
tance than the gay and picturesque appearance of the
medieval world — the solidity which plumps it out, the
conviction which animates the characters. There is

[26]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

immense variety in the Canterbury Tales , and yet, per¬
sisting underneath, one consistent type. Chaucer has
his world; he has his young men; he has his young
women. If one met them straying in Shakespeare’s
world one would know them to be Chaucer’s, not
Shakespeare’s. He wants to describe a girl, and this
is what she looks like :

Ful semely hir wimpel pinched was,

Hir nose tretys ; hir eyen greye as glas ;

Hir mouth ful smal, and ther-to soft and reed ;

But sikerly she hadde a fair foreheed ;

It was almost a spanne brood, I trowe;

For, hardily, she was nat undergrowe.

Then he goes on to develop her; she was a girl, a virgin,
cold in her virginity :

I am, thou woost, yet of thy companye,

A mayde, and love hunting and venerye,

And for to walken in the wodes wilde,

And noght to been a wyf and be with childe.

Next he bethinks him how

Discreet she was in answering alway;

And though she had been as wise as Pallas
No countrefeted termes hadde she
To seme wys; but after hir degree
She spak, and alle hir wordes more and lesse
Souninge in vertu and in gentillesse.

Each of these quotations, in fact, comes from a dif¬
ferent Tale, but they are parts, one feels, of the same

[27]

THE PAS TONS AND CHAUCER

personage, whom he had in mind, perhaps uncon¬
sciously, when he thought of a young girl, and for this
reason, as she goes in and out of the Canterbury Tales
bearing different names, she has a stability which is
only to be found where the poet has made up his mind
about young women, of course, but also about the world
they live in, its end, its nature, and his own craft and
technique, so that his mind is free to apply its force
fully to its object. It does not occur to him that his
Griselda might be improved or altered. There is no
blur about her, no hesitation; she proves nothing; she
is content to be herself. Upon her, therefore, the mind
can rest with that unconscious ease which allows it,
from hints and suggestions, to endow her with many
more qualities than are actually referred to. Such is
the power of conviction, a rare gift, a gift shared in our
day by Joseph Conrad in his earlier novels, and a gift
of supreme importance, for upon it the whole weight
of the building depends. Once believe in Chaucer’s
young men and women and we have no need of preach¬
ing or protest. We know what he finds good, what
evil ; the less said the better. Let him get on with his
story, paint knights and squires, good women and bad,
cooks, shipmen, priests, and we will supply the land¬
scape, give his society its belief, its standing towards
life and death, and make of the journey to Canterbury
a spiritual pilgrimage.

This simple faithfulness to his own conceptions was
easier then than now in one respect at least, for Chaucer
could write frankly where we must either say nothing

[28]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

or say it slyly. He could sound every note in the
language instead of finding a great many of the best
gone dumb from disuse, and thus, when struck by dar¬
ing fingers, giving off a loud discordant jangle out of
keeping with the rest. Much of Chaucer — a few lines
perhaps in each of the Tales — is improper and gives us
as we read it the strange sensation of being naked to
the air after being muffled in old clothing. And, as a
certain kind of humour depends upon being able to
speak without self-consciousness of the parts and func¬
tions of the body, so with the advent of decency litera¬
ture lost the use of one of its limbs. It lost its power
to create the Wife of Bath, Juliet’s nurse, and their
recognisable though already colourless relation, Moll
Flanders. Sterne, from fear of coarseness, is forced
into indecency. He must be witty, not humorous.
He must hint instead of speaking outright. Nor can
we believe, with Mr. Joyce’s Ulysses before us, that
laughter of the old kind will ever be heard again.

But, lord Christ! When that it remembreth me
Up-on my yowthe, and on my Iolitee,

It tikleth me aboute myn herte rote.

Unto this day it doth myn herte bote
That I have had my world as in my tyme.

The sound of that old woman’s voice is still.

But there is another and more important reason for
the surprising brightness, the still effective merriment
of the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer was a poet; but he
never flinched from the life that was being lived at the

[29]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

moment before his eyes. A farmyard, with its straw,
its dung, its cocks and its hens is not (we have come to
think) a poetic subject; poets seem either to rule out
the farmyard entirely or to require that it shall be a
farmyard in Thessaly and its pigs of mythological
origin. But Chaucer says outright:

Three large sowes hadde she, and namo,

Three kyn, and eek a sheep that highte Malle ;

or again,

A yard she hadde, enclosed al aboute
With stikkes, and a drye ditch with-oute.

He is unabashed and unafraid. He will always get
close up to his object — an old man’s chin —

With thikke bristles of his berde unsofte,

Lyk to the skin of houndfish, sharp as brere;

or an old man’s neck —

The slakke skin aboute his nekke shaketh
Whyl that he sang;

and he will tell you what his characters wore, how they
looked, what they ate and drank, as if poetry could
handle the common facts of this very moment of
Tuesday, the sixteenth day of April, 1387, without
dirtying her hands. If he withdraws to the time of
the Greeks or the Romans, it is only that his story leads
him there. He has no desire to wrap himself round
in antiquity, to take refuge in age, or to shirk the asso¬
ciations of common grocer’s English.

[30] '

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

Therefore when we say that we know the end of the
journey, it is hard to quote the particular lines from
which we take our knowledge. He fixed his eyes upon
the road before him, not upon the world to come. He
was little given to abstract contemplation. He depre¬
cated, with peculiar archness, any competition with the
scholars and divines:

The answere of this I lete to divynis,

But wel I woot, that in this world grey pyne is.

What is this world? What asketh men to have?

Now with his love, now in the colde grave
Allone, withouten any companye,

he asks, or ponders

O cruel goddes, that governe
This world with binding of your worde eterne,

And wryten in the table of athamaunt
Your parlement, and your eterne graunt,

What is mankinde more un-to yow holde
Than is the sheepe, that rouketh in the folde?

Questions press upon him; he asks questions, but he
is too true a poet to answer them; he leaves them un¬
solved, uncramped by the solution of the moment, thus
fresh for the generations that come after him. In his
life, too, it would be impossible to write him down a
man of this party or of that, a democrat or an aristo¬
crat. He was a staunch churchman, but he laughed at
priests. He was an able public servant and a courtier,
but his views upon sexual morality were extremely lax.
He sympathised with poverty, but did nothing to im-

l3i]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

prove the lot of the poor. It is safe to say that not a
single law has been framed or one stone set upon an¬
other because of anything that Chaucer said or wrote ;
and yet, as we read him, we are of course absorbing
morality at every pore. For among writers there are
two kinds: there are the priests who take you by the
hand and lead you straight up to the mystery; there
are the laymen who imbed their doctrines in flesh and
blood and make a complete model of the world without
excluding the bad or laying stress upon the good.
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley are among the
priests; they give us text after text to be hung upon
the wall, saying after saying to be laid upon the heart
like an amulet against disaster —

Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone

He prayeth best that loveth best

All things both great and small

— such lines of exhortation and command spring to
memory instantly. But Chaucer lets us go our ways
doing the ordinary things with the ordinary people.
His morality lies in the way men and women behave
to each other. We see them eating, drinking, laughing,
and making love, and come to feel without a word be¬
ing said what their standards are and so are steeped
through and through with their morality. There can
be no more forcible preaching than this where all
actions and passions are represented, and instead of
being solemnly exhorted we are left to stray and stare

[32]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

and make out a meaning for ourselves. It is the
morality of ordinary intercourse, the morality of the
novel, which parents and librarians rightly judge to be
far more persuasive than the morality of poetry.

And so, when we shut Chaucer, we feel that without
a word being said the criticism is complete; what we
are saying, thinking, reading, doing has been com¬
mented upon. Nor are we left merely with the sense,
powerful though that is, of having been in good com¬
pany and got used to the ways of good society. For as
we have jogged through the real, the unadorned coun¬
try-side, with first one good fellow cracking his joke
or singing his song and then another, we know that
though this world resembles, it is not in fact our daily
world. It is the world of poetry. Everything happens
here more quickly and more intensely, and with better
order than in life or in prose; there is a formal ele¬
vated dullness which is part of the incantation of po¬
etry; there are lines speaking half a second in advance
what we were about to say, as if we read our thoughts
before words cumbered them; and lines which we go
back to read again with that heightened quality, that
enchantment which keeps them glittering in the mind
long afterwards. And the whole is held in its place,
and its variety and divagations ordered by the power
which is among the most impressive of all — the shap¬
ing power, the architect’s power. It is the peculiarity
of Chaucer, however, that though we feel at once this
quickening, this enchantment, we cannot prove it by
quotation. From most poets quotation is easy and

[33]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

obvious; some metaphor suddenly flowers; some pas¬
sage breaks off from the rest. But Chaucer is very
equal, very even-paced, very unmetaphorical. If we
take six or seven lines in the hope that the quality will
be contained in them it has escaped.

My lord, ye woot that in my fadres place.

Ye dede me strepe out of my povre wede.

And richely me cladden, o your grace
To yow broghte I noght elles, but of drede.

But feyth and nakedness and maydenhede.

In its place that seemed not only memorable and
moving but fit to set beside striking beauties. Cut out
and taken separately it appears ordinary and quiet.
Chaucer, it seems, has some art by which the most ordi¬
nary words and the simplest feelings when laid side
by side make each other shine; when separated lose
their lustre. Thus the pleasure he gives us is different
from the pleasure that other poets give us, because it
is more closely connected with what we have ourselves
felt or observed. Eating, drinking and fine weather,
the May, cocks and hens, millers, old peasant women,
flowers — there is a special stimulus in seeing all these
common things so arranged that they affect us as poetry
affects us, and are yet bright, sober, precise as we see
them out of doors. There is a pungency in this un-
figurative language ; a stately and memorable beauty in
the undraped sentences which follow each other like
women so slightly veiled that you see the lines of their
bodies as they go —

[34]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

And she set down hir water pot anon
Biside the threshold in an oxe’s stall.

And then, as the procession takes its way, tranquilly,
beautifully, out from behind peeps the face of Chaucer,
grinning, malicious, in league with all foxes, donkeys,
and hens, to mock the pomp and ceremonies of life —
witty, intellectual, French, at the same time based
upon a broad bottom of English humour.

So Sir John read his Chaucer in the comfortless
room with the wind blowing and the smoke stinging,
and left his father’s tombstone unmade. But no book,
no tomb, had power to hold him long. He was one of
those ambiguous characters who haunt the boundary
line where one age merges in another and are not able
to inhabit either. At one moment he was all for buying
books cheap; next he was off to France and told his
mother, “My mind is now not most upon books”. In
his own house, where his mother Margaret was per¬
petually making out inventories or confiding in Gloys
the priest, he had no peace or comfort. There was
always reason on her side ; she was a brave woman, for
whose sake one must put up with the priest’s insolence
and choke down one’s rage when the grumbling broke
into open abuse, and “Thou proud priest” and “Thou
proud Squire” were bandied angrily about the room.
All this, with the discomforts of life and the weakness
of his own character, drove him to loiter in pleasanter
places, to put off coming, to put off writing, to put off,

[35]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

year after year, the making of his father’s tombstone.

Yet John Paston had now lain for twelve years un¬
der the bare ground. The Prior of Bromholm sent
word that the grave cloth was in tatters, and he had
tried to patch it himself. Worse still, for a proud
woman like Margaret Paston, the country people mur¬
mured at the Pastons’ lack of piety, and other families
she heard, of no greater standing than theirs, spent
money in pious restoration in the Very church where
her husband lay unremembered. At last, turning from
tournaments and Chaucer and Mistress Anne Hault,
Sir John bethought him of a piece of cloth of gold
which had been used to cover his father’s hearse and
might now be sold to defray the expenses of his tomb.
Margaret had it in safe keeping; she had hoarded it
and cared for it, and spent twenty marks on its repair.
She grudged it ; but there was no help for it. She sent
it him, still distrusting his intentions or his power to
put them into effect. “If you sell it to any other use,”
she wrote, “by my troth I shall never trust you while
I live.”

But this final act, like so many that Sir John had
undertaken in the course of his life, was left undone.
A dispute with the Duke of Suffolk in the year 1479
made it necessary for him to visit London in spite of
the epidemic of sickness that was abroad ; and there, in
dirty lodgings, alone, busy to the end with quarrels,
clamorous to the end for money, Sir John died and was
buried at Whitefriars in London. He left a natural

[36]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

daughter; he left a considerable number of books; but
his father’s tomb was still unmade.

The four thick volumes of the Paston letters, how¬
ever, swallow up this frustrated man as the sea absorbs
a raindrop. For, like all collections of letters, they
seem to hint that we need not care overmuch for the
fortunes of individuals. The family will go on
whether Sir John lives or dies. It is their method to
heap up in mounds of insignificant and often dismal
dust the innumerable trivialities of daily life, as it
grinds itself out, year after year. And then suddenly
they blaze up; the day shines out, complete, alive, be¬
fore our eyes. It is early morning and strange men
have been whispering among the women as they milk.
It is evening, and there in the churchyard Wame’s wife
bursts out against old Agnes Paston: “All the devils
of Hell draw her soul to Hell.” Now it is the autumn
in Norfolk and Cecily Dawne comes whining to Sir
John for clothing. “Moreover, Sir, liketh it your mas¬
tership to understand that winter and cold weather
draweth nigh and I have few clothes but of your gift.”
There is the ancient day, spread out before us, hour by
hour.

But in all this there is no writing for writing’s sake ;
no use of the pen to convey pleasure or amusement or
any of the million shades of endearment and intimacy
which have filled so many English letters since. Only
occasionally, under stress of anger for the most part,
does Margaret Paston quicken into some shrewd saw

[37]

THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER

or solemn curse. “Men cut large thongs here out of
other men’s leather. ... We beat the brushes and
other men have the birds. . . . Haste reweth . . .
which is to my heart a very spear.” That is her elo¬
quence and that her anguish. Her sons, it is true, bend
their pens more easily to their will. They jest rather
stiffly; they hint rather clumsily; they make a little
scene like a rough puppet show of the old priest’s anger
and give a phrase or two directly as they were spoken
in person. But when Chaucer lived he must have heard
this very language, matter of fact, unmetaphorical,
far better fitted for narrative than for analysis, capable
of religious solemnity or of broad humour, but very
stiff material to put on the lips of men and women ac¬
costing each other face to face. In short it is easy to
see, from the Paston letters, why Chaucer wrote not
Lear or Romeo and Juliet, but the Canterbury Tales .

Sir John was buried; and John the younger brother
succeeded in his turn. The Paston letters go on; life
at Paston continues much the same as before. Over it
all broods a sense of discomfort and nakedness ; of un¬
washed limbs thrust into splendid clothing; of tapestry
blowing on the draughty walls; of the bedroom with
its privy; of winds sweeping straight over land unmiti¬
gated by hedge or town; of Caister Castle covering
with solid stone six acres of ground, and of the plain¬
faced Pastons indefatigably accumulating wealth,
treading out the roads of Norfolk, and persisting with
an obstinate courage which does them infinite credit in
furnishing the bareness of England.

[38]

On Not Knowing Greek

For it is vain and foolish to talk of Knowing
Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at
the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do
not know how the words sounded, or where precisely
we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and
between this foreign people and ourselves there is not
only difference of race and tongue but a tremendous
breach of tradition. All the more strange, then, is
it that we should wish to know Greek, try to know
Greek, feel for ever drawn back to Greek, and be for
ever making up some notion of the meaning of Greek,
though from what incongruous odds and ends, with
what slight resemblance to the real meaning of Greek,
who shall say*?

It is obvious in the first place that Greek literature
is the impersonal literature. Those few hundred years
that separate John Paston from Plato, Norwich from
Athens, make a chasm which the vast tide of European
chatter can never succeed in crossing. When we
read Chaucer, we are floated up to him insensibly on
the current of our ancestors’ lives, and later, as records
increase and memories lengthen, there is scarcely a
figure which has not its nimbus of association, its life
and letters, its wife and family, its house, its character,
its happy or dismal catastrophe. But the Greeks
remain in a fastness of their own. Fate has been kind

[39]

ON NOT KNOWING GREEK

there too. She has preserved them from vulgarity,
Euripides was eaten by dogs; Aeschylus killed by a
stone; Sappho leapt from a cliff. We know no more
of them than that. We have their poetry, and that
is all.

But that is not, and perhaps never can be, wholly
true. Pick up any play by Sophocles, read —

Son of him who led our hosts at Troy of old, son of
Agamemnon,

and at once the mind begins to fashion itself sur¬
roundings. It makes some background, even of the
most provisional sort, for Sophocles; it imagines some
village, in a remote part of the country, near the sea.
Even nowadays such villages are to be found in the
wilder parts of England, and as we enter them we
can scarcely help feeling that here, in this cluster of
cottages, cut off from rail or city, are all the elements
of a perfect existence. Here is the Rectory; here
the Manor house, the farm and the cottages; the
church for worship, the club for meeting, the cricket
field for play. Here life is simply sorted out into its
main elements. Each man and woman has his work;
each works for the health or happiness of others. And
here, in this little community, characters become part
of the common stock; the eccentricities of the clergy¬
man are known; the great ladies’ defects of temper;
the blacksmith’s feud with the milkman, and the
loves and matings of the boys and girls. Here life
has cut the same grooves for centuries; customs have

[40]

ON NOT KNOWING GREEK

arisen; legends have attached themselves to hilltops
and solitary trees, and the village has its history, its
festivals, and its rivalries.

It is the climate that is impossible. If we try to
think of Sophocles here, we must annihilate the smoke
and the damp and the thick wet mists. We must
sharpen the lines of the hills. We must imagine a
beauty of stone and earth rather than of woods and
greenery. With warmth and sunshine and months
of brilliant, fine weather, life of course is instantly
changed; it is transacted out of doors, with the result,
known to all who visit Italy, that small incidents are
debated in the street, not in the sitting-room, and
become dramatic; make people voluble; inspire in
them that sneering, laughing, nimbleness of wit and
tongue peculiar to the Southern races, which has
nothing in common with the slow reserve, the low half¬
tones, the brooding introspective melancholy of people
accustomed to live more than half the year indoors.

That is the quality that first strikes us in Greek
literature, the lightning-quick, sneering, out-of-doors
manner. It is apparent in the most august as well
as in the most trivial places. Queens and Princesses
in this very tragedy by Sophocles stand at the door
bandying words like village women, with a tendency,
as one might expect, to rejoice in language, to split
phrases into slices, to be intent on verbal victory.
The humour of the people was not good natured like
that of our postmen and cabdrivers. The taunts of
men lounging at the street corners had something cruel

[4i]

ON NOT KNOWING GREEK

in them as well as witty. There is a cruelty in Greek
tragedy which is quite unlike our English brutality.
Is not Pentheus, for example, that highly respectable
man, made ridiculous in the Baccluz before he is de¬
stroyed? In fact, of course, these Queens and Prin¬
cesses were out of doors, with the bees buzzing past
them, shadows crossing them, and the wind taking
their draperies. They were speaking to an enormous
audience rayed round them on one of those brilliant
southern days when the sun is so hot and yet the air so
exciting. The poet, therefore, had to bethink him, not
of some theme which could be read for hours by people
in privacy, but of something emphatic, familiar, brief,
that would carry, instantly and directly, to an audi¬
ence of seventeen thousand people, perhaps, with ears
and eyes eager and attentive, with bodies whose mus¬
cles would grow stiff if they sat too long without diver¬
sion. Music and dancing he would need, and naturally
would choose one of those legends, like our Tristram
and Iseult, which are known to every one in outline,
so that a great fund of emotion is ready prepared, but
can be stressed in a new place by each new poet.

Sophocles would take the old story of Electra, for
instance, but would at once impose his stamp upon it.
Of that, in spite of our weakness and distortion, what
remains visible to us? That his genius was of the ex¬
treme kind in the first place; that he chose a design
which, if it failed, would show its failure in gashes and
ruin, not in the gentle blurring of some insignificant
detail ; which, if it succeeded, would cut each stroke to

[42]

ON NOT KNOWING GREEK

the bone, would stamp each finger-print in marble.
His Electra stands before us like a figure so tightly
bound that she can only move an inch this way, an
inch that. But each movement must tell to the utmost,
or, bound as she is, denied the relief of all hints, repeti¬
tions, suggestions, she will be nothing but a dummy,
tightly bound. Her words in crisis are, as a matter of
fact, bare; mere cries of despair, joy, hate

ol ,y,G) , o/Ud/la iv yj^epqc.

7talcfQV, el oOevsig, &L7t/*yjv.

But these cries give angle and outline to the play. It
is thus, with a thousand differences of degree, that in
English literature Jane Austen shapes a novel. There
comes a moment — “I will dance with you,” says Emma
— which rises higher than the rest, which, though not
eloquent in itself, or violent, or made striking by beauty
of language, has the whole weight of the book behind
it. In Jane Austen, too, we have the same sense,
though the ligatures are much less tight, that her fig¬
ures are bound, and restricted to a few definite move¬
ments. She, too, in her modest, everyday prose, chose
the dangerous art where one slip means death.

But it is not so easy to decide what it is that gives
these cries of Electra in her anguish their power to cut
and wound and excite. It is partly that we know her,
that we have picked up from little turns and twists of
the dialogue hints of her character, of her appearance,
which, characteristically, she neglected; of something
suffering in her, outraged and stimulated to its utmost

[43]

ON NOT KNOWING GREEK

stretch of capacity, yet, as she herself knows (“my
behaviour is unseemly and becomes me ill”), blunted
and debased by the horror of her position, an unwed girl
made to witness her mother’s vileness and denounce it
in loud, almost vulgar, clamour to the world at large.
It is partly, too, that we know in the same way that
Clytemnestra is no unmitigated villainess. “ heuvov t 6
rtlxteLv kd'tiv” she says — “there is a strange power
in motherhood”. It is no murderess, violent and un¬
redeemed, whom Orestes kills within the house, and
Electra bids him utterly destroy — “strike again”. No;
the men and women standing out in the sunlight be¬
fore the audience on the hillside were alive enough,
subtle enough, not mere figures, or plaster casts of
human beings.

Yet it is not because we can analyse them into feel¬
ings that they impress us. In six pages of Proust we
can find more complicated and varied emotions than in
the whole of the Electra. But in the Electra or in the
Antigone we are impressed by something different, by
something perhaps more impressive — by heroism itself,
by fidelity itself. In spite of the labour and the diffi¬
culty it is this that draws us back and back to the
Greeks; the stable, the permanent, the original human
being is to be found there. Violent emotions are
needed to rouse him into action, but when thus stirred
by death, by betrayal, by some other primitive calam¬
ity, Antigone and Ajax and Electra behave in the way
in which we should behave thus struck down ; the way
in which everybody has always behaved; and thus we

[44]

ON NOT KNOWING GREEK

understand them more easily and more directly than we
understand the characters in the Canterbury Tales.
These are the originals, Chaucer’s the varieties of the
human species.

It is true, of course, that these types of the original
man or woman, these heroic Kings, these faithful
daughters, these tragic Queens who stalk through the
ages always planting their feet in the same places,
twitching their robes with the same gestures, from habit
not from impulse, are among the greatest bores and
the most demoralising companions in the world. The
plays of Addison, Voltaire, and a host of others are
there to prove it. But encounter them in Greek. Even
in Sophocles, whose reputation for restraint and mas¬
tery has filtered down to us from the scholars, they are
decided, ruthless, direct. A fragment of their speech
broken off would, we feel, colour oceans and oceans
of the respectable drama. Here we meet them before
their emotions have been worn into uniformity. Here
we listen to the nightingale whose song echoes through
English literature singing in her own Greek tongue.
For the first time Orpheus with his lute makes men and
beasts follow him. Their voices ring out clear and
sharp ; we see the hairy tawny bodies at play in the sun¬
light among the olive trees, not posed gracefully on
granite plinths in the pale corridors of the British Mu¬
seum. And then suddenly, in the midst of all this
sharpness and compression, Electra, as if she swept her
veil over her face and forbade us to think of her any
more, speaks of that very nightingale: “that bird dis-

[45]

1

ON NOT KNOWING GREEK

i

traught with grief, the messenger of Zeus. Ah, queen
of sorrow, Niobe, thee I deem divine — thee; who ever¬
more weepest in thy rocky tomb”.

And as she silences her own complaint, she perplexes
us again with the insoluble question of poetry and its
nature, and why, as she speaks thus, her words put on
the assurance of immortality. For they are Greek; we
cannot tell how they sounded ; they ignore the obvious
sources of excitement; they owe nothing of their effect
to any extravagance of expression, and certainly they
throw no light upon the speaker’s character or the
writer’s. But they remain, something that has been
stated and must eternally endure.

Yet in a play how dangerous this poetry, this lapse
from the particular to the general must of necessity be,
with the actors standing there in person, with their
bodies and their faces passively waiting to be made use
of! For this reason the later plays of Shakespeare,
where there is more of poetry than of action, are better
read than seen, better understood by leaving out the
actual body than by having the body, with all its asso¬
ciations and movements, visible to the eye. The in¬
tolerable restrictions of the drama could be loosened,
however, if a means could be found by which what was
general and poetic, comment, not action, could be freed
without interrupting the movement of the whole. It is
this that the choruses supply; the old men or women
who take no active part in the drama, the undifferen¬
tiated voices who sing like birds in the pauses of the
wind ; who can comment, or sum up, or allow the poet

[46]

ON NOT KNOWING GREEK

to speak himself or supply, by contrast, another side
to his conception. Always in imaginative literature,
where characters speak for themselves and the author
has no part, the need c f that voice is making itself felt.
For though Shakespeare (unless we consider that his
fools and madmen supply the part) dispensed with
the chorus, novelists are always devising some substi¬
tute — Thackeray speaking in his own person, Fielding
coming out and addressing the world before his curtain
rises. So to grasp the meaning of the play the chorus
is of the utmost importance. One must be able to
pass easily into those ecstasies, those wild and ap¬
parently irrelevant utterances, those sometimes obvious
and commonplace statements, to decide their relevance
or irrelevance, and give them their relation to the play
as a whole.

We must “be able to pass easily”; but that of course
is exactly what we cannot do. For the most part the
choruses, with all their obscurities, must be spelt out
and their symmetry mauled. But we can guess that
Sophocles used them not to express something outside
the action of the play, but to sing the praises of some
virtue, or the beauties of some place mentioned in it.
He selects what he wishes to emphasise and sings of
white Colonus and its nightingale, or of love uncon¬
quered in fight. Lovely, lofty, and serene his choruses
grow naturally out of his situations, and change, not
the point of view, but the mood. In Euripides, how¬
ever, the situations are not contained within them¬
selves; they give off an atmosphere of doubt, of sug-

[47]

ON NOT KNOWING GREEK

gestion, of questioning; but if we look to the choruses
to make this plain we are often baffled rather than in¬
structed. At once in the Baccha we are in the world
of psychology and doubt; the world where the mind
twists facts and changes them and makes the familiar
aspects of life appear new and questionable. What is
Bacchus, and who are the Gods, and what is man’s
duty to them, and what the rights of his subtle brain?
To these questions the chorus makes no reply, or replies
mockingly, or speaks darkly as if the straitness of the
dramatic form had tempted Euripides to violate it in
order to relieve his mind of its weight. Time is so
short and I have so much to say, that unless you will
allow me to place together two apparently unrelated
statements and trust to you to pull them together, you
must be content with a mere skeleton of the play I
might have given you. Such is the argument. Eurip¬
ides therefore suffers less than Sophocles and less than
Aeschylus from being read privately in a room, and
not seen on a hillside in the sunshine. He can be acted
in the mind ; he can comment upon the questions of the
moment ; more than the others he will vary in popular¬
ity from age to age.

If then in Sophocles the play is concentrated in the
figures themselves, and in Euripides is to be retrieved
from flashes of poetry and questions far flung and un¬
answered, Aeschylus makes these little dramas (the
Agamemnon has 1663 lines; hear about 2600), tre¬
mendous by stretching every phrase to the utmost, by
sending them floating forth in metaphors, by bidding

[48]

ON NOT KNOWING GREEK

them rise up and stalk eyeless and majestic through the
scene. To understand him it is not so necessary to un¬
derstand Greek as to understand poetry. It is neces¬
sary to take that dangerous leap through the air with¬
out the support of words which Shakespeare also asks
of us. For words, when opposed to such a blast of
meaning, must give out, must be blown astray, and
only by collecting in companies convey the meaning
which each one separately is too weak to express. Con¬
necting them in a rapid flight of the mind we know
instantly and instinctively what they mean, but could
not decant that meaning afresh into any other words.
There is an ambiguity which is the mark of the highest
poetry; we cannot know exactly what it means. Take
this from the Agamemnon for instance —

oggatav ev a%y]vicug eppei 7ia<j’ ’ A^po^Ta.

The meaning is just on the far side of language. It is
the meaning which in moments of astonishing excite¬
ment and stress we perceive in our minds without
words; it is the meaning that Dostoevsky (hampered
as he was by prose and as we are by translation) leads
us to by some astonishing run up the scale of emotions
and points at but cannot indicate; the meaning that '
Shakespeare succeeds in snaring.

Aeschylus thus will not give, as Sophocles gives,
the very words that people might have spoken, only so
arranged that they have in some mysterious way a
general force, a symbolic power, nor like Euripides will
he combine incongruities and thus enlarge his little

[49l

ON NOT KNOWING GREEK

space, as a small room is enlarged by mirrors in odd
corners. By the bold and running use of metaphor he
will amplify and give us, not the thing itself, but the
reverberation and reflection which, taken into his mind,
the thing has made; close enough to the original to
illustrate it, remote enough to heighten, enlarge, and
make splendid.

For none of these dramatists had the license which
belongs to the novelist, and, in some degree, to all
writers of printed books, of modelling their meaning
with an infinity of slight touches which can only be
properly applied by reading quietly, carefully, and
sometimes two or three times over. Every sentence
had to explode on striking the ear, however slowly
and beautifully the words might then descend, and
however enigmatic might their final purport be. No
splendour or richness of metaphor could have saved the
Agamemnon if either images or allusions of the sub¬
tlest or most decorative had got between us and the
naked cry

ot'ot'oToZ 7(6710 £. 8d. <j ’tioX^ov, c) ’rtoTJAov.

Dramatic they had to be at whatever cost.

But winter fell on these villages, darkness and ex¬
treme cold descended on the hill-side. There must
have been some place indoors where men could retire,
both in the depths of winter and in the summer heats,
where they could sit and drink, where they could lie
stretched at their ease, where they could talk. It is
Plato, of course, who reveals the life indoors, and de-

[50]

ON NOT KNOWING GREEK

scribes how, when a party of friends met and had eaten
not at all luxuriously and drunk a little wine, some
handsome boy ventured a question, or quoted an opin¬
ion, and Socrates took it up, fingered it, turned it round,
looked at it this way and that, swiftly stripped it of its
inconsistencies and falsities and brought the whole com¬
pany by degrees to gaze with him at the truth. It is
an exhausting process; to contract painfully upon the
exact meaning of words; to judge what each admission
involves; to follow intently, yet critically, the dwin¬
dling and changing of opinion as it hardens and intensi¬
fies into truth. Are pleasure and good the same*? Can
virtue be taught*? Is virtue knowledge*? The tired or
feeble mind may easily lapse as the remorseless ques¬
tioning proceeds ; but no one, however weak, can fail,
even if he does not learn more from Plato, to love
knowledge better. For as the argument mounts from
step to step, Protagoras yielding, Socrates pushing
on, what matters is not so much the end we reach
as our manner of reaching it. That all can feel —
the indomitable honesty, the courage, the love of
truth which draw Socrates and us in his wake to the
summit where, if we too may stand for a moment,
it is to enjoy the greatest felicity of which we are
capable.

Yet such an expression seems ill fitted to describe
the state of mind of a student to whom, after painful
argument, the truth has been revealed. But truth is
various; truth comes to us in different disguises; it is
not with the intellect alone that we perceive it. It is

[5i]

ON NOT KNOWING GREEK

a winter’s night; the tables are spread at Agathon’s
house; the girl is playing the flute; Socrates has washed
himself and put on sandals ; he has stopped in the hall ;
he refuses to move when they send for him. Now Soc-
rates has done ; he is bantering Alcibiades ; Alcibiades
takes a fillet and binds it round “this wonderful fel¬
low’s head”. He praises Socrates. “For he cares not
for mere beauty, but despises more than any one can
imagine all external possessions, whether it be beauty
or wealth or glory, or any other thing for which the
multitude felicitates the possessor. He esteems these
things and us who honour them, as nothing, and lives
among men, making all the objects of their admiration
the playthings of his irony. But I know not if any one
of you has ever seen the divine images which are within,
when he has been opened and is serious. I have seen
them, and they are so supremely beautiful, so golden,
divine, and wonderful, that everything which Socrates
commands surely ought to be obeyed even like the voice
of a God.” All this flows over the arguments of Plato
— laughter and movement; people getting up and go¬
ing out; the hour changing; tempers being lost; jokes
cracked; the dawn rising. Truth, it seems, is various;
Truth is to be pursued with all our faculties. Are we
to rule out the amusements, the tendernesses, the fri¬
volities of friendship because we love truth? Will
truth be quicker found because we stop our ears to
music and drink no wine, and sleep instead of talking
through the long winter’s night? It is not to the clois¬
tered disciplinarian mortifying himself in solitude that

[52]

ON NOT KNOWING GREEK

we are to turn, but to the well-sunned nature, the man
who practises the art of living to the best advantage, so
that nothing is stunted but some things are perma¬
nently more valuable than others.

So in these dialogues we are made to seek truth with
every part of us. For Plato, of course, had the dra¬
matic genius. It is by means of that, by an art which
conveys in a sentence or two the setting and the atmos¬
phere, and then with perfect adroitness insinuates itself
into the coils of the argument without losing its liveli¬
ness and grace, and then contracts to bare statement,
and then, mounting, expands and soars in that higher
air which is generally reached only by the more ex¬
treme measures of poetry — it is this art which plays
upon us in so many ways at once and brings us to an
exultation of mind which can only be reached when
all the powers are called upon to contribute their energy
to the whole.

But we must beware. Socrates did not care for
‘“'mere beauty”, by which he meant, perhaps, beauty
as ornament. A people who judged as much as the
Athenians did by ear, sitting out-of-doors at the play
or listening to argument in the market-place, were far
less apt than we are to break off sentences and appre¬
ciate them apart from the context. For them there
were no Beauties of Hardy, Beauties of Meredith, Say¬
ings from George Eliot. The writer had to think more
of the whole and less of the detail. Naturally, living
in the open, it was not the lip or the eye that struck
them, but the carriage of the body and the proportions

[53]

ON NOT KNOWING GREEK

of its parts. Thus when we quote and extract we do
the Greeks more damage than we do the English.
There is a bareness and abruptness in their literature
which grates upon a taste accustomed to the intricacy
and finish of printed books. We have to stretch our
minds to grasp a whole devoid of the prettiness of de¬
tail or the emphasis of eloquence. Accustomed to look
directly and largely rather than minutely and aslant,
it was safe for them to step into the thick of emotions
which blind and bewilder an age like our own. In
the vast catastrophe of the European war our emotions
had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from
us, before we could allow ourselves to feel them in
poetry or fiction. The only poets who spoke to the
purpose spoke in the sidelong, satiric manner of Wilfrid
Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. It was not possible for
them to be direct without being clumsy; or to speak
simply of emotion without being sentimental. But the
Greeks could say, as if for the first time, “Yet being
dead they have not died”. They could say, “If to die
nobly is the chief part of excellence, to us out of all
men Fortune gave this lot; for hastening to set a
crown of freedom on Greece we lie possessed of praise
that grows not old”. They could march straight up,
with their eyes open; and thus fearlessly approached,
emotions stand still and suffer themselves to be
looked at.

But again (the question comes back and back), Are
we reading Greek as it was written when we say this?
When we read these few words cut on a tombstone, a

[54]

ON NOT KNOWING GREEK

stanza in a chorus, the end or the opening of a dialogue
of Plato’s, a fragment of Sappho, when we bruise our
minds upon some tremendous metaphor in the Agamem¬
non instead of stripping the branch of its flowers in¬
stantly as we do in reading hear — are we not reading
wrongly*? losing our sharp sight in the haze of associa¬
tions? reading into Greek poetry not what they have
but what we lack? Does not the whole of Greece heap
itself behind every line of its literature? They admit
us to a vision of the earth unravaged, the sea unpol¬
luted, the maturity, tried but unbroken, of mankind.
Every word is reinforced by a vigour which pours out
of olive-tree and temple and the bodies of the young.
The nightingale has only to be named by Sophocles
and she sings ; the grove has only to be called a/fo-roi',
“untrodden”, and we imagine the twisted branches and
the purple violets. Back and back we are drawn to
steep ourselves in what, perhaps, is only an image of
the reality, not the reality itself, a summer’s day imag¬
ined in the heart of a northern winter. Chief among
these sources of glamour and perhaps misunderstanding
is the language. We can never hope to get the whole
fling of a sentence in Greek as we do in English. We
cannot hear it, now dissonant, now harmonious, toss¬
ing sound from line to line across a page. We cannot
pick up infallibly one by one all those minute signals
by which a phrase is made to hint, to turn, to live.
Nevertheless it is the language that has us most in
bondage; the desire for that which perpetually lures us
back. First there is the compactness of the expression.

[55]

ON NOT KNOWING GREEK

Shelley takes twenty-one words in English to translate
thirteen words of Greek.

iz a? youv n tnyTTjs yiyvsTai} xav apouao? rd izplv^ ov &v vEpw<; a<prjTai.

. . . For every one, even if before he were ever so undis¬
ciplined, becomes a poet as soon as he is touched by love.

Every ounce of fat has been pared off, leaving the
flesh firm. Then, spare and bare as it is, no language
can move more quickly, dancing, shaking, all alive,
but controlled. Then there are the words themselves
which, in so many instances, we have made expressive
to us of our own emotions, thalassa , thanatos , anthos ,
aster — to take the first that come to hand; so clear,
so hard, so intense, that to speak plainly yet fittingly
without blurring the outline or clouding the depths
Greek is the only expression. It is useless, then, to
read Greek in translations. Translators can but offer
us a vague equivalent; their language is necessarily
full of echoes and associations. Professor Mackail says
“wan”, and the age of Burne-Jones and Morris is at
once evoked. Nor can the subtler stress, the flight
and the fall of the words, be kept even by the most
skilful of scholars —

. . . thee, who evermore weepest in thy rocky tomb
is not

St* iv r a<ptp 7t£Tpa(tp}
ai , daxpuei?

[56]

ON NOT KNOWING GREEK

Further, in reckoning the doubts and difficulties there
is this important problem — Where are we to laugh in
reading Greek? There is a passage in the Odyssey
where laughter begins to steal upon us, but if Homer
were looking we should probably think it better to con¬
trol our merriment. To laugh instantly it is almost
necessary (though Aristophanes may supply us with an
exception) to laugh in English. Humour, after all, is
closely bound up with a sense of the body. When we
laugh at the humour of Wycherley, we are laughing
with the body of that burly rustic who was our com¬
mon ancestor on the village green. The French, the
Italians, the Americans, who derive physically from so
different a stock, pause, as we pause in reading Homer,
to make sure that they are laughing in the right place,
and the pause is fatal. Thus humour is the first of the
gifts to perish in a foreign tongue, and when we turn
from Greek to Elizabethan literature it seems, after a
long silence, as if our great age were ushered in by a
burst of laughter.

These are all difficulties, sources of misunder¬
standing, of distorted and romantic, of servile and
snobbish passion. Yet even for the unlearned some
certainties remain. Greek is the impersonal literature ;
it is also the literature of masterpieces. There are no
schools; no forerunners; no heirs. We cannot trace a
gradual process working in many men imperfectly until
it expresses itself adequately at last in one. Again,
there is always about Greek literature that air of vigour
which permeates an “age”, whether it is the age of

[57]

ON NOT KNOWING GREEK

Aeschylus, or Racine, or Shakespeare. One generation
at least in that fortunate time is blown on to be writers
to the extreme; to attain that unconsciousness which
means that the consciousness is stimulated to the high¬
est extent ; to surpass the limits of small triumphs and
tentative experiments. Thus we have Sappho with her
constellations of adjectives, Plato daring extravagant
flights of poetry in the midst of prose ; Thucydides, con¬
stricted and contracted; Sophocles gliding like a shoal
of trout smoothly and quietly, apparently motionless,
and then with a flicker of fins off and away; while in
the Odyssey we have what remains the triumph of nar¬
rative, the clearest and at the same time the most ro¬
mantic story of the fortunes of men and women.

The Odyssey is merely a story of adventure, the in¬
stinctive story-telling of a sea-faring race. So we may
begin it, reading quickly in the spirit of children
wanting amusement to find out what happens next.
But here is nothing immature ; here are full-grown peo¬
ple, crafty, subtle, and passionate. Nor is the world
itself a small one, since the sea which separates island
from island has to be crossed by little hand-made boats
and is measured by the flight of the sea-gulls. It is
true that the islands are not thickly populated, and the
people, though everything is made by hand, are not
closely kept at work. They have had time to develop
a very dignified, a very stately society, with an ancient
tradition of manners behind it, which makes every rela¬
tion at once orderly, natural, and full of reserve.
Penelope crosses the room; Telemachus goes to bed;

[58]

ON NOT KNOWING GREEK

Nausicaa washes her linen; and their actions seem laden
with beauty because they do not know that they are
beautiful, have been born to their possessions, are no
more self-conscious than children, and yet, all those
thousands of years ago, in their little islands, know all
that is to be known. With the sound of the sea in their
ears, vines, meadows, rivulets about them, they are
even more aware than we are of a ruthless fate. There
is a sadness at the back of life which they do not at¬
tempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own stand¬
ing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and
gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is to the
Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness,
of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consola¬
tions, of our own age.

[59]

The Elizabethan Lumber

Room

These magnificent volumes 1 are not often, perhaps,
read through. Part of their charm consists in the fact
that Hakluyt is not so much a book as a great bundle
of commodities loosely tied together, an emporium, a
lumber room strewn with ancient sacks, obsolete nauti¬
cal instruments, huge bales of wool, and little bags of
rubies and emeralds. One is for ever untying this
packet here, sampling that heap over there, wiping the
dust off some vast map of the world, and sitting down
in semi-darkness to snuff the strange smells of silks
and leathers and ambergris, while outside tumble the
huge waves of the uncharted Elizabethan sea.

For this jumble of seeds, silks, unicorns’ horns, ele¬
phants’ teeth, wool, common stones, turbans, and bars
of gold, these odds and ends of priceless value and com¬
plete worthlessness, were the fruit of innumerable voy¬
ages, traffics, and discoveries to unknown lands in the
reign of Queen Elizabeth. The expeditions were
manned by “apt young men” from the West country,
and financed in part by the great Queen herself. The
ships, says Froude, were no bigger than modern
yachts. There in the river by Greenwich the fleet lay

1 Hakluyt’s Collection of the Early Voyages, Travels, and Dis¬
coveries of the English Nation, five volumes, 4to, 1810.

[61]

THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM

gathered, close to the Palace. “The Privy council
looked out of the windows of the court . . . the ships
thereupon discharge their ordnance . . . and the mari¬
ners they shouted in such sort that the sky rang again
with the noise thereof.” Then, as the ships swung
down the tide, one sailor after another walked the
hatches, climbed the shrouds, stood upon the main-
yards to wave his friends a last farewell. Many would
come back no more. For directly England and the
coast of France were beneath the horizon, the ships
sailed into the unfamiliar; the air had its voices, the
sea its lions and serpents, its evaporations of fire and
tumultuous whirlpools. But God too was very close;
the clouds but sparely hid the divinity Himself; the
limbs of Satan were almost visible. Familiarly the
English sailors pitted their God against the God of the
Turks, who “can speake never a word for dulnes, much
lesse can he helpe them in such an extremitie. . . .
But howsoever their God behaved himself, our God
showed himself a God indeed. . . .” God was as near
by sea as by land, said Sir Humphrey Gilbert, riding
through the storm. Suddenly one light disappeared;
Sir Humphrey Gilbert had gone beneath the waves;
when morning came, they sought his ship in vain. Sir
Hugh Willoughby sailed to discover the North-West
Passage and made no return. The Earl of Cumber¬
land’s men, hung up by adverse winds off the coast of
Cornwall for a fortnight, licked the muddy water off
the deck in agony. And sometimes a ragged and worn-
out man came knocking at the door of an English coun-

[62]

THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM

try house and claimed to be the boy who had left it
years ago to sail the seas. “Sir William his father, and
my lady his mother knew him not to be their son, until
they found a secret mark, which was a wart upon one
of his knees.” But he had with him a black stone,
veined w.’th gold, or an ivory tusk, or a silver ingot, and
urged on the village youth with talk of gold strewn
over the land as stones are strewn in the fields of Eng¬
land. One expedition might fail, but what if the pas¬
sage to the fabled land of uncounted riches lay only a
little further up the coast? What if the known world
was only the prelude to some more splendid panorama?
When, after the long voyage, the ships dropped anchor
in the great river of the Plate and the men went ex¬
ploring through the undulating lands, startling grazing
herds of deer, seeing the limbs of savages between the
trees, they filled their pockets with pebbles that might
be emeralds or sand that might be gold ; or sometimes,
rounding a headland, they saw, far off, a string of sav¬
ages slowly descending to the beach bearing on their
heads and linking their shoulders together with heavy
burdens for the Spanish King.

These are the fine stories used effectively all through
the West country to decoy “the apt young men”
lounging by the harbour-side to leave their nets and
fish for gold. But the voyagers were sober merchants
into the bargain, citizens with the good of English
trade and the welfare of English work-people at heart.
The captains are reminded how necessary it is to find
a market abroad for English wool ; to discover the herb

[63]

THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM

from which blue dyes are made; above all to make in¬
quiry as to the methods of producing oil, since all at¬
tempts to make it from radish seed have failed. They
are reminded of the misery of the English poor, whose
crimes, brought about by poverty, make them “daily
consumed by the gallows”. They are reminded how
the soil of England had been enriched by the discover¬
ies of travellers in the past; how Dr. Linaker brought
seeds of the damask rose and tulipas, and how beasts
and plants and herbs, “without which our life were to
be said barbarous”, have all come to England gradually
from abroad. In search of markets and of goods, of
the immortal fame success would bring them, the apt
young men set sail for the North, and were left, a little
company of isolated Englishmen surrounded by snow
and the huts of savages, to make what bargains they
could and pick up what knowledge they might before
the ships returned in the summer to fetch them home
again. There they endured, an isolated company, burn¬
ing on the rim of the dark. One of them, carrying a
charter from his company in London, went inland as
far as Moscow, and there saw the Emperor “sitting in
his chair of estate with his crown on his head, and a
staff of goldsmiths’ work in his left hand”. All the
ceremony that he saw is carefully written out, and the
sight upon which the English merchant first set eyes
has the brilliancy of a Roman vase dug up and stood
for a moment in the sun, until, exposed to the air, seen
by millions of eyes, it dulls and crumbles away. There,
all these centuries, on the outskirts of the world, the

[64]

THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM

glories of Moscow, the glories of Constantinople have
flowered unseen. The Englishman was bravely dressed
for the occasion, led “three fair mastiffs in coats of red
cloth”, and carried a letter from Elizabeth “the paper
whereof did smell most fragrantly of camphor and
ambergris, and the ink of perfect musk”. And some¬
times, since trophies from the amazing new world were
eagerly awaited at home, together with unicorns’ horns
and lumps of ambergris and the fine stories of the en¬
gendering of whales and “debates” of elephants and
dragons whose blood, mixed, congealed into vermilion,
a living sample would be sent, a live savage caught
somewhere off the coast of Labrador, taken to England,
and shown about like a wild beast. Next year they
brought him back, and took a woman savage on board
to keep him company. When they saw each other they
blushed; they blushed profoundly, but the sailors,
though they noted it, knew not why. Later the two
savages set up house together on board ship, she at¬
tending to his wants, he nursing her in sickness. But,
as the sailors noted again, the savages lived together in
perfect chastity.

All this, the new words, the new ideas, the waves,
the savages, the adventures, found their way naturally
into the plays which were being acted on the banks
of the Thames. There was an audience quick to
seize upon the coloured and the high-sounding; to asso¬
ciate those

frigates bottom’d with rich Sethin planks,

Topt with the lofty firs of Lebanon

[65]

THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM

with the adventures of their own sons and brothers
abroad. The Verneys, for example, had a wild boy
who had gone as pirate, turned Turk, and died out
there, sending back to Claydon to be kept as relics of
him some silk, a turban, and a pilgrim’s staff. A gulf
lay between the spartan domestic housecraft of the Pas-
ton women and the refined tastes of the Elizabethan
Court ladies, who, grown old, says Harrison, spent
their time reading histories, or “writing volumes of
their own, or translating of other men’s into our Eng¬
lish and Latin tongue”, while the younger ladies played
the lute and the citharne and spent their leisure in the
enjoyment of music. Thus, with singing and with
music, springs into existence the characteristic Eliza¬
bethan extravagance; the dolphins and lavoltas of
Greene; the hyperbole, more surprising in a writer so
terse and muscular, of Ben Jonson. Thus we find the
whole of Elizabethan literature strewn with gold and
silver; with talk of Guiana’s rarities, and references
to that America — “O my America! my new-found-
land” — which was not merely a land on the map, but
symbolised the unknown territories of the soul. So,
over the water, the imagination of Montaigne brooded
in fascination upon savages, cannibals, society, and
government.

But the mention of Montaigne suggests that though
the influence of the sea and the voyages, of the lumber-
room crammed with sea beasts and horns and ivory and
old maps and nautical instruments, helped to inspire
the greatest age of English poetry, its effects were by

[66]

THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM

no means so beneficial upon English prose. Rhyme and
metre helped the poets to keep the tumult of their per¬
ceptions in order. But the prose writer, without these
restrictions, accumulated clauses, petered out in inter¬
minable catalogues, tripped and stumbled over the con¬
volutions of his own rich draperies. How little Eliza¬
bethan prose was fit for its office, how exquisitely
French prose was already adapted, can be seen by com¬
paring a passage from Sidney’s Defense of Poesie with
one from Montaigne’s Essays.

He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur
the margent with interpretations, and load the memory with
doubtfulness : but he cometh to you with words set in delight¬
ful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for the
well enchanting Skill of Music, and with a tale (forsooth)
he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from
play, and old men from the Chimney corner; and pretending
no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wicked¬
ness to virtue; even as the child is often brought to take most
wholesome things by hiding them in such other as have a
pleasant taste: which if one should begin to tell them the
nature of the Aloes or Rhubarb arum they should receive,
would sooner take their physic at their ears than at their
mouth, so is it in men (most of which are childish in the
best things, till they be cradled in their graves) glad they
will be to hear the tales of Hercules. . . .

And so it runs on for seventy-six words more. Sid¬
ney’s prose in an uninterrupted monologue, with sud¬
den flashes of felicity and splendid phrases, which lends
itself to lamentations and moralities, to long accumula¬
tions and catalogues, but is never quick, never collo-

[67]

THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM

quial, unable to grasp a thought closely and firmly, or
to adapt itself flexibly and exactly to the chops and
changes of the mind. Compared with this, Montaigne
is master of an instrument which knows its own powers
and limitations, and is capable of insinuating itself into
crannies and crevices which poetry can never reach ; of
cadences different but no less beautiful; capable of
subtleties and intensities which Elizabethan prose
entirely ignores. He is considering the way in which
certain of the ancients met death :

. . . ils l’ont faicte couler et glisser parmy la laschete de
leurs occupations accoustumees entre des garses et bons com-
paignons ; nul propos de consolation, nulle mention de testa¬
ment, nulle affectation ambitieuse de Constance, nul discours de
leur condition future; mais entre les jeux, les festins, facecies,
entretiens communs et populaires, et la musique, et des vers
amoureux.

An age seems to separate Sidney from Montaigne.
The English compared with the French are as boys
compared with men.

But the Elizabethan prose writers, if they have the
formlessness of youth have, too, its freshness and
audacity. In the same essay Sidney shapes language,
masterfully and easily, to his liking; freely and nat¬
urally reaches his hand for a metaphor. To bring this
prose to perfection (and Dry den’s prose is very near
perfection) only the discipline of the stage was neces¬
sary and the growth of self-consciousness. It is in the
plays, and especially in the comic passages of the plays,

[68]

THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM

that the finest Elizabethan prose is to be found. The
stage was the nursery where prose learnt to find its feet.
For on the stage people had to meet, to quip and crank,
to suffer interruptions, to talk of ordinary things.

Cler. A box of her autumnal face, her pieced beauty! there’s
no man can be admitted till she be ready now-a-days, till she
has painted, and perfumed, and washed, and scoured, but the
boy here; and him she wipes her oiled lips upon, like a
sponge. I have made a song (I pray thee hear it) on the
subject. [Page sings

Still to be neat, still to be drest &c.

True. And I am clearly on the other side: I love a good
dressing before any beauty o’ the world. O, a woman is then
like a delicate garden; nor is there one kind of it; she may
vary every hour; take often counsel of her glass, and choose
the best. If she have good ears, show them; good hair, lay
it out; good legs, wear short clothes; a good hand, discover
it often : practise any art to mend breath, cleanse teeth, repair
eyebrows; paint and profess it.

So the talk runs in Ben Jonson’s Silent Woman ,
knocked into shape by interruptions, sharpened by
collisions, and never allowed to settle into stagnancy
or swell into turbidity. But the publicity of the
stage and the perpetual presence of a second person
were hostile to that growing consciousness of one’s
self, that brooding in solitude over the mysteries of
the soul, which, as the years went by, sought expres¬
sion and found a champion in the sublime genius of
Sir Thomas Browne. His immense egotism has paved

[69]

THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM

the way for all psychological novelists, autobiog¬
raphers, confession-mongers, and dealers in the curi¬
ous shades of our private life. He it was who first
turned from the contacts of men with men to their
lonely life within. “The world that I regard is
myself; it is the microcosm of my own frame that I
cast mine eye on; for the other I use it but like my
globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation.”
All was mystery and darkness as the first explorer
walked the catacombs swinging his lanthorn. “I feel
sometimes a hell within myself ; Lucifer keeps his court
in my breast; Legion is revived in me.” In these
solitudes there were no guides and no companions.
“I am in the dark to all the world, and my nearest
friends behold me but in a cloud.” The strangest
thoughts and imaginings have play with him as he
goes about his work, outwardly the most sober of
mankind and esteemed the greatest physician in Nor¬
wich. He has wished for death. He has doubted all
things. What if we are asleep in this world and the
conceits of life are as mere dreams? The tavern
music, the Ave Mary bell, the broken pot that the
workman has dug out of the field — at the sight and
sound of them he stops dead, as if transfixed by the
astonishing vista that opens before his imagination.
“We carry with us the wonders we seek without us;
there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.” A halo
of wonder encircles everything that he sees; he turns
his light gradually upon the flowers and insects and
grasses at his feet so as to disturb nothing in the

[70]

THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM

mysterious processes of their existence. With the
same awe, mixed with a sublime complacency, he
records the discovery of his own qualities and attain¬
ments. He was charitable and brave and averse from
nothing. He was full of feeling for others and mer¬
ciless upon himself. “For my conversation, it is like
the sun’s, with all men, and with a friendly aspect
to good and bad.” He knows six languages, the laws,
the customs and policies of several states, the names
of all the constellations and most of the plants of his
country, and yet, so sweeping is his imagination, so
large the horizon in which he sees this little figure
walking that “methinks I do not know so many as
when I did but know a hundred, and had scarcely
ever simpled further than Cheapside”.

He is the first of the autobiographers. Swooping
and soaring at the highest altitudes he stoops suddenly
with loving particularity upon the details of his own
body. His height was moderate, he tells us, his eyes
large and luminous; his skin dark but constantly suf¬
fused with blushes. He dressed very plainly. He
seldom laughed. He collected coins, kept maggots in
boxes, dissected the lungs of frogs, braved the stench
of the spermaceti whale, tolerated Jews, had a good
word for the deformity of the toad, and combined a
scientific and sceptical attitude towards most things
with an unfortunate belief in witches. In short, as
we say when we cannot help laughing at the oddities
of people we admire most, he was a character, and the
first to make us feel that the most sublime specula-

[71]

V

THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM

tions of the human imagination are issued from a
particular man, whom we can love. In the midst of
the solemnities of the Urn Burial we smile when he
remarks that afflictions induce callosities. The smile
broadens to laughter as we mouth out the splendid
pomposities, the astonishing conjectures of the Religio
Medici. Whatever he writes is stamped with his own
idiosyncrasy, and we first became conscious of im¬
purities which hereafter stain literature with so many
freakish colours that, however hard we try, make it
difficult to be certain whether we are looking at a
man or his writing. Now we are in the presence of
sublime imagination; now rambling through one of
the finest lumber rooms in the world — a chamber
stuffed from floor to ceiling with ivory, old iron,
broken pots, urns, unicorns’ horns, and magic glasses
full of emerald lights and blue mystery.

[72]

Notes on an Elizabethan

There are, it must be admitted, some highly for¬
midable tracts in English literature, and chief among
them that jungle, forest, and wilderness which is the
Elizabethan drama. For many reasons, not here to
be examined, Shakespeare stands out, Shakespeare
who has had the light on him from his day to ours,
Shakespeare who towers highest when looked at from
the level of his own contemporaries. But the plays
of the lesser Elizabethans — Greene, Dekker, Peele,
Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, — to adventure into
that wilderness is for the ordinary reader an ordeal,
an upsetting experience which plies him with ques¬
tions, harries him with doubts, alternately delights
and vexes him with pleasures and pains. For we are
apt to forget, reading, as we tend to do, only the
masterpieces of a bygone age how great a power the
body of a literature possesses to impose itself: how
it will not suffer itself to be read passively, but takes
us and reads us; flouts our preconceptions; questions
principles which we had got into the habit of taking
for granted, and, in fact, splits us into two parts as
we read, making us, even as we enjoy, yield our
ground or stick to our guns.

At the outset in reading an Elizabethan play we

[73]

NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY

are overcome by the extraordinary discrepancy be¬
tween the Elizabethan view of reality and our own.
The reality to which we have grown accustomed, is,
speaking roughly, based upon the life and death of
some knight called Smith, who succeeded his father
in the family business of pitwood importers, timber
merchants and coal exporters, was well known in
political, temperance, and church circles, did much
for the poor of Liverpool, and died last Wednesday
of pneumonia while on a visit to his son at Muswell
Hill. That is the world we know. That is the
reality which our poets and novelists have to expound
and illuminate. Then we open the first Elizabethan
play that comes to hand and read how

I once did see

In my young travels through Armenia
An angry unicorn in his full career
Charge with too swift a foot a jeweller
That watch’d him for the treasure of his brow
And ere he could get shelter of a tree
Nail him with his rich antlers to the earth.

Where is Smith, we ask, where is Liverpool1? And
the groves of Elizabethan drama echo “Where1?”
Exquisite is the delight, sublime the relief of being
set free to wander in the land of the unicorn and the
jeweller among dukes and grandees, Gonzaloes and
Bellimperias, who spend their lives in murder and
intrigue, dress up as men if they are women, as
women if they are men, see ghosts, run mad, and die

[74]

NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY

in the greatest profusion on the slightest provocation,
uttering as they fall imprecations of superb vigour or
elegies of the wildest despair. But soon the low, the
relentless voice, which if we wish to identify it we
must suppose typical of a reader fed on modern Eng¬
lish literature, and French and Russian, asks why,
then, with all this to stimulate and enchant these old
plays are for long stretches of time so intolerably
dull? Is it not that literature, if it is to keep us on
the alert through five acts or thirty-two chapters must
somehow be based on Smith, have one toe touching
Liverpool, take off into whatever heights it pleases
from reality? We are not so purblind as to suppose
that a man because his name is Smith and he lives at
Liverpool is therefore “real”. We know indeed that
this reality is a chameleon, quality, the fantastic be¬
coming as we grow used to it often the closest to the
truth, the sober the furthest from it, and nothing
proving a writer’s greatness more than his capacity to
consolidate his scene by the use of what, until he
touched them, seemed wisps of cloud and threads of
gossamer. Our contention merely is that there is a
station, somewhere in mid-air, whence Smith and
Liverpool can be seen to the best advantage; that the
great artist is the man who knows where to place
himself above the shifting scenery; that while he
never loses sight of Liverpool he never sees it in the
wrong perspective. The Elizabethans bore us, then,
because their Smiths are all changed to dukes, their
Liverpools to fabulous islands and palaces in Genoa.

[75]

NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY

Instead of keeping a, proper poise above life they soar
miles into the empyrean, where nothing is visible for
long hours at a time but clouds at their revelry, and
a cloud landscape is not ultimately satisfactory to
human eyes. The Elizabethans bore us because they
suffocate our imaginations rather than set them to work.

Still, though potent enough, the boredom of an
Elizabethan play is of a different quality altogether
from the boredom which a nineteCnth-century play,
a Tennyson or a Henry Taylor play, inflicts. The
riot of images, the violent volubility of language, all
that cloys and satiates in the Elizabethans yet appears
to be drawn up with a roar as a feeble fire is sucked
up by a newspaper. There is, even in the worst, an
intermittent bawling vigour which gives us the sense
in our quiet arm-chairs of ostlers and orange-girls
catching up the lines, flinging them back, hissing or
stamping applause. But the deliberate drama of the
Victorian age is evidently written in a study. It has
for audience ticking clocks and rows of classics bound
in half morocco. There is no stamping, no applause.
It does not, as, with all its faults, the Elizabethan
audience did, leaven the mass with fire. Rhetorical
and bombastic, the lines are flung and hurried into
existence and reach the same impromptu felicities,
have the same lip-moulded profusion and unexpected¬
ness, which speech sometimes achieves, but seldom in
our day the deliberate, solitary pen. Indeed half the
work of the dramatists one feels was done in the
Elizabethan age by the public.

[76]

NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY

Against that, however, is to be set the fact that
the influence of the public was in many respects de¬
testable. To its door we must lay the greatest inflic¬
tion that Elizabethan drama puts upon us — the plot;
the incessant, improbable, almost unintelligible con¬
volutions which presumably gratified the spirit of an
excitable and unlettered public actually in the play¬
house, but only confuse and fatigue a reader with the
book before him. Undoubtedly something must hap¬
pen; undoubtedly a play where nothing happens is
an impossibility. But we have a right to demand
(since the Greeks have proved that it is perfectly
possible) that what happens shall have an end in
view. It shall agitate great emotions; bring into
existence memorable scenes ; stir the actors to say what
could not be said without this stimulus. Nobody can
fail to remember the plot of the Antigone , because
what happens is so closely bound up with the emo¬
tions of the actors that we remember the people and
the plot at one and the same time. But who can tell
us what happens in the White Devil, or the Maid’s
Tragedy , except by remembering the story apart from
the emotions which it has aroused? As for the lesser
Elizabethans, like Greene and Kyd, the complexities
of their plots are so great, and the violence which
those plots demand so terrific, that the actors them¬
selves are obliterated and emotions which, according
to our convention at least, deserve the most careful
investigation, the most delicate analysis, are clean
sponged off the slate. And the result is inevitable.

[77]

NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY

Outside Shakespeare and perhaps Ben Jonson, there
are no characters in Elizabethan drama, only violences
whom we know so little that we can scarcely care
what becomes of them. Take any hero or heroine in
those early plays — Bellimperia in the Spanish Tragedy
will serve as well as another — and can we honestly
say that we care a jot for the unfortunate, lady who
runs the whole gamut of human misery to kill herself
in the end*? No more than for an. animated broom¬
stick, we must reply, and in a work dealing with men
and women the prevalence of broomsticks is a draw¬
back. But the Spanish Tragedy is admittedly a crude
forerunner, chiefly valuable because such primitive
efforts lay bare the formidable framework which
greater dramatists could modify, but had to use.
Ford, it is claimed, is of the school of Stendhal and
of Flaubert; Ford is a psychologist. Ford is an
analyst. “This man”, says Mr. Havelock Ellis,
“writes of women not as a dramatist nor as a lover,
but as one who has searched intimately and felt with
instinctive sympathy the fibres of their hearts.”

The play — ’Tis pity she's a Whore — upon which
this judgement is chiefly based shows us the whole
nature of Annabella spun from pole to pole in a
series of tremendous vicissitudes. First, her brother
tells her that he loves her; next she confesses her love
for him; next finds herself with child by him; next
forces herself to marry Soranzo; next is discovered;
next repents; finally is killed, and it is her lover and
brother who kills her. To trace the trail of feelings

[78]

NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY

which such crises and calamities might be expected to
breed in a woman of ordinary sensibility might have
filled volumes. A dramatist of course has no volumes
to fill. He is forced to contract. Even so, he can
illumine; he can reveal enough for us to guess the
rest. But what is it that we know without using
microscopes and splitting hairs about the character of
Annabella*? Gropingly we make out that she is a
spirited girl, with her defiance of her husband when
he abuses her, her snatches of Italian song, her ready
wit, her simple glad love-making. But of character
as we understand the word there is no trace. We do
not know how she reaches her conclusions, only that
she has reached them. Nobody describes her. She is
always at the height of her passion, never at its ap¬
proach. Compare her with Anna Karenina. The
Russian woman is flesh and blood, nerves and tem¬
perament, has heart, brain, body and mind where the
English girl is flat and crude as a face painted on a
playing card; she is without depth, without range,
without intricacy. But as we say this we know that
we have missed something. We have let the meaning
of the play slip through our hands. We have ignored
the emotion which has been accumulating because it
has accumulated in places where we have not ex¬
pected to find it. We have been comparing the play
with prose, and the play, after all, is poetry.

The play is poetry we say, and the novel prose.
Let us attempt to obliterate detail, and place the two
before us side by side, feeling, so far as we can, the

[79l

NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY

angles and edges of each, recalling each, so far as we
are able, as a whole. Then, at once, the prime dif¬
ferences emerge ; the long leisurely accumulated novel ;
the little contracted play; the emotion all split up,
dissipated and then woven together, slowly and gradu¬
ally massed into a whole, in the novel; the emotion
concentrated, generalised, heightened in the play.
What moments of intensity, what phrases of aston¬
ishing beauty the play shot at us ! /

O, my lords,

I but deceived your eyes with antic gesture,

When one news straight came huddling on another
Of death! and death! and death! still I danced forward.

or

You have oft for these two lips
Neglected cassia or the natural sweets
Of the spring-violet: they are not yet much wither’d.

With all her reality, Anna Karenina could never say

“You have oft, for these two lips
Neglected cassia”.

Some of the most profound of human emotions are
therefore beyond her reach. The extremes of passion
are not for the novelist; the perfect marriages of
sense and sound are not for him; he must tame his
swiftness to sluggardry; keep his eyes on the ground
not on the sky: suggest by description, not reveal by
illumination. Instead of singing

[80]

NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY

Lay a garland on my hearse
Of the dismal yew ;

Maidens, willow branches bear;

Say I died true,

he must enumerate the chrysanthemums fading on the
grave and the undertakers’ men snuffling past in their
four-wheelers. How then can we compare this lum¬
bering and lagging art with poetry? Granted all the
little dexterities by which the novelist makes us know
the individual and recognise the real, the dramatist
goes beyond the single and the separate, shows us not
Annabella in love, but love itself ; not Anna Karenina
throwing herself under the train, but ruin and death
and the

. . . soul, like a ship in a black storm,

. . . driven, I know not whither.

So with pardonable impatience we might exclaim
as we shut our Elizabethan play. But what then is
the exclamation with which we close War and Peace ?
Not one of disappointment; we are not left lamenting
the superficiality, upbraiding the triviality of the
novelist’s art. Rather we are made more than ever
aware of the inexhaustible richness of human sensi¬
bility. Here, in the play, we recognise the general;
here, in the novel, the particular. Here we gather all
our energies into a bunch and spring. Here we ex¬
tend and expand and let come slowly in from all
quarters deliberate impressions, accumulated messages.
The mind is so saturated with sensibility, language so

[81]

NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY

inadequate to its experience, that far from ruling off
one form of literature or decreeing its inferiority to
others we complain that they are still unable to keep
pace with the wealth of material, and wait impa¬
tiently the creation of what may yet be devised to
liberate us of the enormous burden of the unexpressed.

Thus, in spite of dullness, bombast, rhetoric, and
confusion we still read the lesser Elizabethans, still
find ourselves adventuring in the land of the jeweller
and the unicorn. The familiar factories of Liverpool
fade into thin air and we scarcely recognise any like¬
ness between the knight who imported timber and
died of pneumonia at Muswell Hill and the Armenian
Duke who fell like a Roman on his sword while the
owl shrieked in the ivy and the Duchess gave birth to
a still-born babe ’mongst women howling. To join
those territories and recognise the same man in dif¬
ferent disguises we have to adjust and revise. But
make the necessary alterations in perspective, draw in
those filaments of sensibility which the moderns have
so marvellously developed, use instead the ear and
the eye which the moderns have so basely starved,
hear words as they are laughed and shouted, not as
they are printed in black letters on the page, see
before your eyes the changing faces and living bodies
of men and women, put yourself, in short, into a dif¬
ferent, but not more elementary stage of your reading
development and then the true merits of Elizabethan
drama will assert themselves. The power of the
whole is undeniable. Theirs, too, is the word-coining

[82]

NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY

genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and
came up dripping. Theirs is that broad humour
based upon the nakedness of the body, which, how¬
ever arduously the public spirited may try, is impos¬
sible, since the body is draped. Then at the back of
this, imposing not unity but some sort of stability, is
what we may briefly call a sense of the presence of
the Gods. He would be a bold critic who should
attempt to impose any creed upon the swarm and
variety of the Elizabethan dramatists, and yet it im¬
plies some timidity if we take it for granted that a
whole literature with common characteristics is a
mere evaporation of high spirits, a money-making
enterprise, a fluke of the mind which, owing to favour¬
able circumstances, came off successfully. Even in
the jungle and the wilderness the compass still points.

“Lord, Lord, that I were dead!”

they are for ever crying.

O thou soft natural death that art joint-twin
To sweetest slumber -

The pageant of the world is marvellous, but the
pageant of the world is vanity.

glories

Of human greatness are but pleasing dreams
And shadows soon decaying: on the stage
Of my mortality my youth hath acted
Some scenes of vanity -

[83]

NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY

To die and be quit of it all is their desire; the bell
that tolls throughout the drama is death and disen¬
chantment.

All life is but a wandering to find home,

When we’re gone, we’re there.

Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand
grimly to confront the other presence of Elizabethan
drama which is life: life compact of- frigates, fir trees
and ivory, of dolphins and the juice of July flowers,
of the milk of unicorns and panthers’ breath, of ropes
of pearl, brains of peacocks and Cretan wine. To
this, life at its most reckless and abundant, they reply

Man is a tree that hath no top in cares.

No root in comforts; all his power to live
Is given to no end but t’ have power to grieve.

It is this echo flung back and back from the other
side of the play which, if it has not the name, still
has the effect of the presence of the Gods.

So we ramble through the jungle, forest, and wil¬
derness of Elizabethan drama. So we consort with
Emperors and clowns, jewellers and unicorns, and
laugh and exult and marvel at the splendour and
humour and fantasy of it all. A noble rage consumes
us when the curtain falls; we are bored too, and nau¬
seated by the wearisome old tricks and florid bombast.
A dozen deaths of full-grown men and women move
us less than the suffering of one of Tolstoi’s flies.
Wandering in the maze of the impossible and tedious

[84]

V

NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY

story suddenly some passionate intensity seizes us;
some sublimity exalts, or some melodious snatch of
song enchants. It is a world full of tedium and de¬
light; pleasure and curiosity, of extravagant laughter,
poetry, and splendour. But gradually it comes over
us, what then are we being denied*? What is it that
we are coming to want so persistently that unless we
get it instantly we must seek elsewhere? It is soli¬
tude. There is no privacy here. Always the door
opens and some one comes in. All is shared, made
visible, audible, dramatic. Meanwhile, as if tired
with company, the mind steals off to muse in solitude ;
to think, not to act; to comment, not to share; to
explore its own darkness, not the bright-lit-up sur¬
faces of others. It turns to Donne, to Montaigne, to
Sir Thomas Browne — the keepers of the keys of soli¬
tude.

[85]

Montaigne

Once at Bar-le-Duc Montaigne saw a portrait which
Rene, King of Sicily, had painted of himself, and
asked, “Why is it not, in like manner, lawful for
every one to draw himself with a pen, as he did with
a crayon?” Off-hand one might reply, Not only is
it lawful, but nothing could be easier. Other people
may evade us, but our own features are almost too
familiar. Let us begin. And then, when we attempt
the task, the pen falls from our fingers; it is a matter
of profound, mysterious, and overwhelming difficulty.

After all, in the whole of literature, how many
people have succeeded in drawing themselves with a
pen? Only Montaigne and Pepys and Rousseau per¬
haps. The Religio Medici is a coloured glass through
which darkly one sees racing stars and a strange and
turbulent soul. A bright polished mirror reflects the
face of Boswell peeping between other people’s shoul¬
ders in the famous biography. But this talking of
oneself, following one’s own vagaries, giving the
whole map, weight, colour, and circumference of the
soul in its confusion, its variety, its imperfection —
this art belonged to one man only: to Montaigne.
As the centuries go by, there is always a crowd before
that picture, gazing into its depths, seeing their own
faces reflected in it, seeing more the longer they look,
never being able to say quite what it is that they see.

[87]

MONTAIGNE

New editions testify to the perennial fascination.
Here is the Navarre Society in England reprinting in
five fine volumes 1 Cotton’s translation ; while in
France the firm of Louis Conard is issuing the com¬
plete works of Montaigne with the various readings
in an edition to which Dr. Armaingaud has devoted
a long lifetime of research.

To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself
near at hand, is not easy.

We hear of but two or three of the ancients who have beaten
this road [said Montaigne]. No one since has followed the
track; ’tis a rugged road, more so than it seems, to follow a
pace so rambling and uncertain, as that of the soul; to pene¬
trate the dark profundities of its intricate internal windings;
to choose and lay hold of so many little nimble motions ; ’tis
a new and extraordinary undertaking, and that withdraws us
from the common and most recommended employments of the
world.

There is, in the first place, the difficulty of expres¬
sion. We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process
called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to
some one opposite, what we think, then how little we
are able to convey! The phantom is through the
mind and out of the window before we can lay salt
on its tail, or slowly sinking and returning to the
profound darkness which it has lit up momentarily
with a wandering light. Face, voice, and accent eke
out our words and impress their feebleness with char-

1 Essays of Montaigne , translated by Charles Cotton, 5 vols. The
Navarre Society, £6 : 6s. net.

[88]

MONTAIGNE

acter in speech. But the pen is a rigid instrument; it
can say very little; it has all kinds of habits and
ceremonies of its own. It is dictatorial too: it is
always making ordinary men into prophets, and
changing the natural stumbling trip of human speech
into the solemn and stately march of pens. It is for
this reason that Montaigne stands out from the
legions of the dead with such irrepressible vivacity.
We can never doubt for an instant that his book was
himself. He refused to teach; he refused to preach;
he kept on saying that he was just like other people.
All his effort was to write himself down, to com¬
municate, to tell the truth, and that is a “rugged
road, more than it seems”.

For beyond the difficulty of communicating one¬
self, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.
This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with
the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her
what she thinks, she is always saying the very oppo¬
site to what other people say. Other people, for
instance, long ago made up their minds that old
invalidish gentlemen ought to stay at home and edify
the rest of us by the spectacle of their connubial
fidelity. The soul of Montaigne said, on the con¬
trary, that it is in old age that one ought to travel,
and marriage, which, rightly, is very seldom founded
on love, is apt to become, towards the end of life, a
formal tie better broken up. Again with politics,
statesmen are always praising the greatness of Em¬
pire, and preaching the moral duty of civilising the

[89]

MONTAIGNE

savage. But look at the Spanish in Mexico, cried
Montaigne in a burst of rage. “So many cities lev¬
elled with the ground, so many nations exterminated
. . . and the richest and most beautiful part of the
world turned upside down for the traffic of pearl and
pepper ! Mechanic victories !” And then when the
peasants came and told him that they had found a
man dying of wounds and deserted him for fear lest
justice might incriminate them, Montaigne asked:

What could I have said to these people? ’Tis certain that
this office of humanity would have brought them into trouble.
. . . There is nothing so much, nor so grossly, nor so ordi¬
narily faulty as the laws.

Here the soul, getting restive, is lashing out at the
more palpable forms of Montaigne’s great bugbears,
convention and ceremony. But watch her as she
broods over the fire in the inner room of that tower
which, though detached from the main building, has
so wide a view over the estate. Beally she is the
strangest creature in the world, far from heroic,
variable as a weathercock, “bashful, insolent; chaste,
lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious,
heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing,
ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal” — in short,
so complex, so indefinite, corresponding so little to
the version which does duty for her in public, that a
man might spend his life merely in trying to run her
to earth. The pleasure of the pursuit more than
rewards one for any damage that it may inflict upon

[90]

MONTAIGNE

one’s worldly prospects. The man who is aware of
himself is henceforward independent; and he is never
bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped
through and through with a profound yet temperate
happiness. He alone lives, while other people, slaves
of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of
dream. Once conform, once do what other people do
because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the
finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes
all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous,
and indifferent.

Surely then, if we ask this great master of the art
of life to tell us his secret, he will advise us to with¬
draw to the inner room of our tower and there turn
the pages of books, pursue fancy after fancy as they
chase each other up the chimney, and leave the gov¬
ernment of the world to others. Retirement and con¬
templation — these must be the main elements of his
prescription. But no; Montaigne is by no means
explicit. It is impossible to extract a plain answer
from that subtle, half smiling, half melancholy man,
with the heavy-lidded eyes and the dreamy, quizzical
expression. The truth is that life in the country, with
one’s books and vegetables and flowers, is often ex¬
tremely dull. He could never see that his own green
peas were so much better than other people’s. Paris
was the place he loved best in the whole world —
“jusques a ses verrues et a ses taches”. As for read¬
ing, he could seldom read any book for more than
an hour at a time, and his memory was so bad that

[91]

MON TAIGN E

he forgot what was in his mind as he walked from
one room to another. Book learning is nothing to be
proud of, and as for the achievements of science, what
do they amount to? He had always mixed with
clever men, and his father had a positive veneration
for them, but he had observed that, though they have
their fine moments, their rhapsodies, their visions, the
cleverest tremble on the verge of folly. Observe
yourself: one moment you are exalted; the next a
broken glass puts your nerves on edge. All extremes
are dangerous. It is best to keep in the middle of
the road, in the common ruts, however muddy. In
writing choose the common words; avoid rhapsody
and eloquence — yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the
best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

It appears, then, that we are to aim at a demo¬
cratic simplicity. We may enjoy our room in the
tower, with the painted walls and the commodious
bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man
digging who buried his father this morning, and it is
he and his like who live the real life and speak the
real language. There is certainly an element of truth
in that. Things are said very finely at the lower end
of the table. There are perhaps more of the qualities
that matter among the ignorant than among the
learned. But again, what a vile thing the rabble is!
“the mother of ignorance, injustice, and inconstancy.
Is it reasonable that the life of a wise man should
depend upon the judgment of fools?” Their minds
are weak, soft and without power of resistance. They

[92]

MONTAIGNE

must be told what it is expedient for them to know.
It is not for them to face facts as they are. The
truth can only be known by the well-born soul —
“Fame bien nee”. Who, then, are these well-born
souls, whom we would imitate, if only Montaigne
would enlighten us more precisely?

But no. “Je n’enseigne poinct; je raconte.” After
all, how could he explain other people’s souls when
he could say nothing “entirely simply and solidly,
without confusion or mixture, in one word”, about
his own, when indeed it became daily more and more
in the dark to him? One quality or principle there
is perhaps — that one must not lay down rules. The
souls whom one would wish to resemble, like Etienne
de La Boetie, for example, are always the supplest.
“C’est estre, mais ce n’est pas vivre, que de se tenir
attache et oblige par necessite a un seul train.” The
laws are mere conventions, utterly unable to keep
touch with the vast variety and turmoil of human
impulses; habits and customs are a convenience de¬
vised for the support of timid natures who dare not
allow their souls free play. But we, who have a
private life and hold it infinitely the dearest of our
possessions, suspect nothing so much as an attitude.
Directly we begin to protest, to attitudinise, to lay
down laws, we perish. We are living for others, not
for ourselves. We must respect those who sacrifice
themselves in the public service, load them with
honours, and pity them for allowing, as they must,
the inevitable compromise; but for ourselves let us

[93]

MONTAIGNE

fly fame, honour, and all offices that put us under
an obligation to others. Let us simmer over our in¬
calculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our
hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle — for
the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement
and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is
death; conformity is death: let us say what comes
into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves,
fling out the wildest nonsense, and .follow the most
fantastic fancies without caring what the world does
or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life;
and, of course, order.

This freedom, then, which is the essence of our
being, has to be controlled. But it is difficult to see
what power we are to invoke to help us, since every
restraint of private opinion or public law has been
derided, and Montaigne never ceases to pour scorn
upon the misery, the weakness, the vanity of human
nature. Perhaps, then, it will be well to turn to
religion to guide us? “Perhaps” is one of his fa¬
vourite expressions; “perhaps” and “I think” and all
those words which qualify the rash assumptions of
human ignorance. Such words help one to muffle up
opinions which it would be highly impolitic to speak
outright. For one does not say everything; there are
some things which at present it is advisable only to
hint. One writes for a very few people, who under¬
stand. Certainly, seek the Divine guidance by all
means, but meanwhile there is, for those who live a
private life, another monitor, an invisible censor

[94]

MONTAIGNE

within, “un patron au dedans”, whose blame is much
more to be dreaded than any other because he knows
the truth; nor is there anything sweeter than the
chime of his approval. This is the judge to whom
we must submit; this is the censor who will help us
to achieve that order which is the grace of a well¬
born soul. For “C’est une vie exquise, celle qui se
maintient en ordre jusques en son prive”. But he
will act by his own light; by some internal balance
will achieve that precarious and everchanging poise
which, while it controls, in no way impedes the soul’s
freedom to explore and experiment. Without other
guide, and without precedent, undoubtedly it is far
more difficult to live well the private life than the
public. It is an art which each must learn separately,
though there are, perhaps, two or three men, like
Homer, Alexander the Great, and Epaminondas
among the ancients, and Etienne de La Boetie among
the moderns, whose example may help us. But it is
an art; and the very material in which it works is
variable and complex and infinitely mysterious — hu¬
man nature. To human nature we must keep close.
“. . . il faut vivre entre les vivants”. We must
dread any eccentricity or refinement which cuts us off
from our fellow-beings. Blessed are those who chat
easily with their neighbours about their sport or their
buildings or their quarrels, and honestly enjoy the
talk of carpenters and gardeners. To communicate
is our chief business; society and friendship our chief
delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not

[95]

MONTAIGNE

to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond
our own time and province. Such wonders there are
in the world; halcyons and undiscovered lands, men
with dogs’ heads and eyes in their chests, and laws
and customs, it may well be, far superior to our own.
Possibly we are asleep in this world; possibly there
is some other which is apparent to beings with a sense
which we now lack.

Here then, in spite of all contradictions and of all
qualifications, is something definite. These essays are
an attempt to communicate a soul. On this point
at least he is explicit. It is not fame that he wants;
it is not that men shall quote him in years to come;
he is setting up no statue in the market-place; he
wishes only to communicate his soul. Communica¬
tion is health; communication is truth; communica¬
tion is happiness. To share is our duty; to go down
boldly and bring to light those hidden thoughts which
are the most diseased; to conceal nothing; to pretend
nothing; if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our
friends to let them know it.

“. . . car, comme je scay par une trop certaine experience,
il n’est aucune si douce consolation en la perte de nos amis
que celle que nous aporte la science de n’avoir rien oublie a
leur dire et d’avoir eu avec eux une parfaite et entiere com¬
munication.

There are people who, when they travel, wrap
themselves up “se defendans de la contagion d’un air
incogneu” in silence and suspicion. When they dine

[96]

MONTAIGNE

they must have the same food they get at home.
Every sight and custom is bad unless it resembles
those of their own village. They travel only to re¬
turn. That is entirely the wrong way to set about
it. We should start without any fixed idea where we
are going to spend the night, or when we propose to
come back; the journey is everything. Most neces¬
sary of all, but rarest good fortune, we should try to
find before we start some man of our own sort who
will go with us and to whom we can say the first
thing that comes into our heads. For pleasure has
no relish unless we share it. As for the risks — that
we may catch cold or get a headache — it is always
worth while to risk a little illness for the sake of
pleasure. “Le plaisir est des principales especes du
profit.” Besides if we do what we like, we always do
what is good for us. Doctors and wise men may ob¬
ject, but let us leave doctors and wise men to their
own dismal philosophy. For ourselves, who are ordi¬
nary men and women, let us return thanks to Nature
for her bounty by using every one of the senses she
has given us ; vary our state as much as possible ; turn
now this side, now that, to the warmth, and relish
to the full before the sun goes down the kisses of
youth and the echoes of a beautiful voice singing
Catullus. Every season is likeable, and wet days and
fine, red wine and white, company and solitude.
Even sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of
life, can be full of dreams; and the most common
actions — a walk, a talk, solitude in one’s own orchard

[97]

MONTAIGNE

— can be enhanced and lit up by the association of
the mind. Beauty is everywhere, and beauty is only
two fingers’ breadth from goodness. So, in the name
of health and sanity, let us not dwell on the end of
the journey. Let death come upon us planting our
cabbages, or on horseback, or let us steal away to
some cottage and there let strangers close our eyes,
for a servant sobbing or the touch of a hand would
break us down. Best of all, let death find us at
our usual occupations, among girls and good fellows
who make no protests, no lamentations; let him find
us “parmy les jeux, les festins, faceties, entretiens
communs et populaires, et la musique, et des vers
amoureux”. But enough of death; it is life that
matters.

It is life that emerges more and more clearly as
these essays reach not their end, but their suspension
in full career. It is life that becomes more and more
absorbing as death draws near, one’s self, one’s soul,
every fact of existence: that one wears silk stockings
summer and winter; puts water in one’s wine; has
one’s hair cut after dinner; must have glass to drink
from; has never worn spectacles; has a loud voice;
carries a switch in one’s hand; bites one’s tongue;
fidgets with one’s feet; is apt to scratch one’s ears;
likes meat to be high ; rubs one’s teeth with a napkin
(thank God, they are good!); must have curtains to
one’s bed ; and, what is rather curious, began by liking
radishes, then disliked them, and now likes them
again. No fact is too little to let it slip through one’s

[98]

MONTAIGNE

fingers and besides the interest of facts themselves,
there is the strange power we have of changing facts
by the force of the imagination. Observe how the
soul is always casting her own lights and shadows;
makes the substantial hollow and the frail substan¬
tial; fills broad daylight with dreams; is as much
excited by phantoms as by reality ; and in the moment
of death sports with a trifle. Observe, too, her du¬
plicity, her complexity. She hears of a friend’s loss
and sympathises, and yet has a bitter-sweet malicious
pleasure in the sorrows of others. She believes; at
the same time she does not believe. Observe her
extraordinary susceptibility to impressions, especially
in youth. A rich man steals because his father kept
him short of money as a boy. This wall one builds
not for oneself, but because one’s father loved build¬
ing. In short the soul is all laced about with nerves
and sympathies which affect her every action, and
yet, even now in 1580, no one has any clear knowl¬
edge — such cowards we are, such lovers of the smooth
conventional ways — how she works or what she is
except that of all things she is the most mysterious,
and one’s self the greatest monster and miracle in the
world. . . plus je me hante et connois, plus ma
difformite m’estonne, moins je m’entens en moy.”
Observe, observe perpetually, and, so long as ink and
paper exist, “sans cesse et sans travail” Montaigne
will write.

But there remains one final question which, if we
could make him look up from his enthralling occupa-

[99]

MONTAIGNE

tion, we should like to put to this great master of the
art of life. In these extraordinary volumes of short
and broken, long and learned, logical and contradic¬
tory statements, we have heard the very pulse and
rhythm of the soul, beating day after day, year after
year through a veil which, as time goes on, fines itself
almost to transparency. Here is some one who suc¬
ceeded in the hazardous enterprise of living; who
served his country and lived retired; was landlord,
husband, father; entertained kings, loved women, and
mused for hours alone over old books. By means of
perpetual experiment and observation of the subtlest
he achieved at last a miraculous adjustment of all
these wayward parts that constitute the human soul.
He laid hold of the beauty of the world with all his
fingers. He achieved happiness. If he had had to
live again, he said, he would have lived the same life
over. But, as we watch with absorbed interest the
enthralling spectacle of a soul living openly beneath
our eyes, the question frames itself, Is pleasure the
end of all? Whence this overwhelming interest in
the nature of the soul? Why this overmastering
desire to communicate with others? Is the beauty of
this world enough, or is there, elsewhere, some ex¬
planation of the mystery? To this what answer can
there be? There is none. There is only one more
question: “Que scais-je?”

[IOO]

The Duchess of Newcastle

. . All I desire is fame”, wrote Margaret Cav¬
endish, Duchess of Newcastle. And while she lived
her wish was granted. Garish in her dress, eccentric
in her habits, chaste in her conduct, coarse in her
speech, she succeeded during her lifetime in drawing
upon herself the ridicule of the great and the applause
of the learned. But the last echoes of that clamour
have now all died away; she lives only in the few
splendid phrases that Lamb scattered upon her tomb ;
her poems, her plays, her philosophies, her orations,
her discourses — all those folios and quartos in which,
she protested, her real life was shrined — moulder in
the gloom of public libraries, or are decanted into
tiny thimbles which hold six drops of their profusion.
Even the curious student, inspired by the words of
Lamb, quails before the mass of her mausoleum, peers
in, looks about him, and hurries out again, shutting
the door.

But that hasty glance has shown him the outlines
of a memorable figure. Born (it is conjectured) in
1624, Margaret was the youngest child of a Thomas
Lucas, who died when she was an infant, and her
upbringing was due to her mother, a lady of remark-

1 The Life of William Cavendish , Duke of Newcastle, Etc., edited
by C. H. Firth ; Poems and Fancies, by the Duchess of Newcastle ;
The World’s Olio; Orations of divers Sorts Accommodated to Divers
Places; Female Orations; Plays; Philosophical Letters, etc., etc.

THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE

able character, of majestic grandeur and beauty “be¬
yond the ruin of time”. “She was very skilful in
leases, and setting of lands and court keeping, order¬
ing of stewards, and the like affairs.” The wealth
which thus accrued she spent, not on marriage por¬
tions, but on generous and delightful pleasures, “out
of an opinion that if she bred us with needy neces¬
sity it might chance to create in us sharking qualities”.
Her eight sons and daughters were never beaten, but
reasoned with, finely and gayly dressed, and allowed
no conversation with servants, not because they are
servants but because servants “are for the most part
ill-bred as well as meanly born”. The daughters were
taught the usual accomplishments “rather for for¬
mality than for benefit”, it being their mother’s
opinion that character, happiness, and honesty were
of greater value to a woman than fiddling and sing¬
ing, or “the prating of several languages”.

Already Margaret was eager to take advantage of
such indulgence to gratify certain tastes. Already she
liked reading better than needlework, dressing and
“inventing fashions” better than reading, and writing
best of all. Sixteen paper books of no title, written
in straggling letters, for the impetuosity of her thought
always outdid the pace of her fingers, testify to the
use she made of her mother’s liberality. The happi¬
ness of their home life had other results as well.
They were a devoted family. Long after they were
married, Margaret noted, these handsome brothers
and sisters, with their well-proportioned bodies, their

[102]

THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE

clear complexions, brown hair, sound teeth, “tunable
voices”, and plain way of speaking, kept themselves
“in a flock together”. The presence of strangers
silenced them. But when they were alone, whether
they walked in Spring Gardens or Hyde Park, or had
music, or supped in barges upon the water, their
tongues were loosed and they made “very merry
amongst themselves, . . . judging, condemning, ap¬
proving, commending, as they thought good”.

The happy family life had its effect upon Mar¬
garet’s character. As a child, she would walk for
hours alone, musing and contemplating and reasoning
with herself of “everything her senses did present”.
She took no pleasure in activity of any kind. Toys
did not amuse her, and she could neither learn for¬
eign languages nor dress as other people did. Her
great pleasure was to invent dresses for herself, which
nobody else was to copy, “for”, she remarks, “I always
took delight in a singularity, even in accoutrements
of habits”.

Such a training, at once so cloistered and so free,
should have bred a lettered old maid, glad of her
seclusion, and the writer perhaps of some volume of
letters or translations from the classics, which we
should still quote as proof of the cultivation of our
ancestresses. But there was a wild streak in Mar¬
garet, a love of finery and extravagance and fame,
which was for ever upsetting the orderly arrangements
of nature. When she heard that the Queen, since the
outbreak of the Civil War, had fewer maids-of-honour

[103]

THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE

than usual, she had “a great desire” to become one of
them. Her mother let her go against the judgement
of the rest of the family, who, knowing that she had
never left home and had scarcely been beyond their
sight, justly thought that she might behave at Court
to her disadvantage. “Which indeed I did,” Mar¬
garet confessed ; “for I was so bashful when I was out
of my mother’s, brothers’, and sisters’ sight that . . .
I durst neither look up with my eyes, nor speak, nor
be any way sociable, insomuch as I was thought a
natural fool.” The courtiers laughed at her; and she
retaliated in the obvious way. People were censori¬
ous; men were jealous of brains in a woman; women
suspected intellect in their own sex; and what other
lady, she might justly ask, pondered as she walked
on the nature of matter and whether snails have
teeth*? But the laughter galled her, and she begged
her mother to let her come home. This being re¬
fused, wisely as the event turned out, she stayed on
for two years (1643-45), finally going with the Queen
to Paris, and there, among the exiles who came to
pay their respects to the Court, was the Marquis of
Newcastle. To the general amazement, the princely
nobleman, who had led the King’s forces to disaster
with indomitable courage but little skill, fell in love
with the shy, silent, strangely dressed maid-of-honour.
It was not “amorous love, but honest, honourable
love”, according to Margaret. She was no brilliant
match; she had gained a reputation for prudery and
eccentricity. What, then, could have made so great

[104]

THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE

a nobleman fall at her feet? The onlookers were full
of derision, disparagement, and slander. “I fear”,
Margaret wrote to the Marquis, “others foresee we
shall be unfortunate, though we see it not ourselves,
or else there would not be such pains to untie the
knot of our affections.” Again, “Saint Germains is
a place of much slander, and thinks I send too often
to you”. “Pray consider”, she warned him, “that I
have enemies.” But the match was evidently per¬
fect. The Duke, with his love of poetry and music
and play-writing, his interest in philosophy, his belief
“that nobody knew or could know the cause of any¬
thing”, his romantic and generous temperament, was
naturally drawn to a woman who wrote poetry her¬
self, was also a philosopher of the same way of think¬
ing, and lavished upon him not only the admiration
of a fellow-artist, but the gratitude of a sensitive
creature who had been shielded and succoured by his
extraordinary magnanimity. “He did approve”, she
wrote, “of those bashful fears which many con¬
demned, . . . and though I did dread marriage and
shunned men’s company as much as I could, yet I
. . . had not the power to refuse him.” She kept
him company during the long years of exile; she
entered with sympathy, if not with understanding,
into the conduct and acquirements of those horses
which he trained to such perfection that the Spaniards
crossed themselves and cried “Miraculo!” as they
witnessed their corvets, voltoes, and pirouettes; she
believed that the horses even made a “trampling

[105]

THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE

action” for joy when he came into the stables; she
pleaded his cause in England during the Protectorate ;
and, when the Restoration made it possible for them
to return to England, they lived together in the
depths of the country in the greatest seclusion and
perfect contentment, scribbling plays, poems, philoso¬
phies, greeting each other’s works with raptures of
delight, and confabulating doubtless upon such mar¬
vels of the natural world as chance threw their way.
They were laughed at by their contemporaries ;
Horace Walpole sneered at them. But there can be
no doubt that they were perfectly happy.

For now Margaret could apply herself uninter¬
ruptedly to her writing. She could devise fashions
for herself and her servants. She could scribble more
and more furiously with fingers that became less and
less able to form legible letters. She could even
achieve the miracle of getting her plays acted in
London and her philosophies humbly perused by men
of learning. There they stand, in the British Mu¬
seum, volume after volume, swarming with a diffused,
uneasy, contorted vitality. Order, continuity, the
logical development of her argument are all unknown
to her. No fears impede her. She has the irrespon¬
sibility of a child and the arrogance of a Duchess.
The wildest fancies come to her, and she canters
away on their backs. We seem to hear her, as the
thoughts boil and bubble, calling to John, who sat
with a pen in his hand next door, to come quick,
“John, John, I conceive!” And down it goes — what-

[Jo6]

THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE

ever it may be; sense or nonsense; some thought on
women’s education — “Women live like Bats or Owls,
labour like Beasts, and die like Worms, ... the
best bred women are those whose minds are civilest” ;
some speculation that had struck her perhaps walk¬
ing that afternoon alone — why “hogs have the
measles”, why “dogs that rejoice swing their tails”,
or what the stars are made of, or what this chrysalis
is that her maid has brought her, and she keeps warm
in a corner of her room. On and on, from subject
to subject she flies, never stopping to correct, “for
there is more pleasure in making than in mending”,
talking aloud to herself of all those matters that filled
her brain to her perpetual diversion — of wars, and
boarding-schools, and cutting down trees, of grammar
and morals, of monsters and the British, whether
opium in small quantities is good for lunatics, why it
is that musicians are mad. Looking upwards, she
speculates still more ambitiously upon the nature of
the moon, and if the stars are blazing jellies; looking
downwards she wonders if the fishes know that the
sea is salt; opines that our heads are full of fairies,
“dear to God as we are”; muses whether there are
not other worlds than ours, and reflects that the next
ship may bring us word of a new one. In short, “we
are in utter darkness”. Meanwhile, what a rapture
is thought!

As the vast books appeared from the stately re¬
treat at Welbeck the usual censors made the usual
objections, and had to be answered, despised, or

[107]

THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE

argued with, as her mood varied, in the preface to
every work. They said, among other things, that her
books were not her own, because she used learned
terms, and “wrote of many matters outside her ken”.
She flew to her husband for help, and he answered,
characteristically, that the Duchess “had never con¬
versed with any professed scholar in learning except
her brother and myself”. The Duke’s scholarship,
moreover, was of a peculiar nature. “I have lived in
the great world a great while, and have thought of
what has been brought to me by the senses, more than
was put into me by learned discourse; for I do not
love to be led by the nose, by authority, and old
authors; ipse dixit will not serve my turn.” And
then she takes up the pen and proceeds, with the im¬
portunity and indiscretion of a child, to assure the
world that her ignorance is of the finest quality im¬
aginable. She has only seen Des Cartes and Hobbes,
not questioned them; she did indeed ask Mr. Hobbes
to dinner, but he could not come; she often does not
listen to a word that is said to her ; she does not know
any French, though she lived abroad for five years;
she has only read the old philosophers in Mr. Stanley’s
account of them; of Des Cartes she has read but half
of his work on Passion; and of Hobbes only “the
little book called De Cive”, all of which is infinitely
to the credit of her native wit, so abundant that out¬
side succour pained it, so honest that it would not
accept help from others. It was from the plain of
complete ignorance, the untilled field of her own

[108]

THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE

consciousness, that she proposed to erect a philosophic
system that was to oust all others. The results were
not altogether happy. Under the pressure of such
vast structures, her natural gift, the fresh and deli¬
cate fancy which had led her in her first volume to
write charmingly of Queen Mab and fairyland, was
crushed out of existence. /

The palace of the Queen wherein she dwells.

Its fabric’s built all of hodmandod shells ;

The hangings of a Rainbow made that’s thin,

Shew wondrous fine, when one first enters in ;

The chambers made of Amber that is clear.

Do give a fine sweet smell, if fire be near;

Her bed a cherry stone, is carved throughout,

And with a butterfly’s wing hung about;

Her sheets are of the skin of Dove’s eyes made
Where on a violet bud her pillow’s laid.

So she could write when she was young. But her
fairies, if they survived at all, grew up into hippo¬
potami. Too generously her prayer was granted:

Give me the free and noble style,

Which seems uncurb’d, though it be wild.

She became capable of involutions, and contortions
and conceits of which the following is among the
shortest, but not the most terrific:

The human head may be likened to a town :

The mouth when full, begun

Is market day, when empty, market’s done;

The city conduct, where the water flows,

Is with two spouts, the nostrils and the nose.

[109]

THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE

She similised, energetically, incongruously, eternally;
the sea became a meadow, the sailors shepherds, the
mast a maypole. The fly was the bird of summer,
trees were senators, houses ships, and even the fairies,
whom she loved better than any earthly thing, except
the Duke, are changed into blunt atoms and sharp
atoms, and take part in some of those horrible
manoeuvres in which she delighted to marshal the
universe. Truly, “my Lady Sanspareille hath a
strange spreading wit”. Worse still, without an
atom of dramatic power, she turned to play-writing.
It was a simple process. The unwieldy thoughts which
turned and tumbled within her were christened Sir
Golden Riches, Moll Meanbred, Sir Puppy Dogman,
and the rest, and sent revolving in tedious debate upon
the parts of the soul, or whether virtue is better than
riches, round a wise and learned lady who answered
their questions and corrected their fallacies at consider¬
able length in tones which we seem to have heard be¬
fore.

Sometimes, however, the Duchess walked abroad.
She would issue out in her own proper person, dressed
in a thousand gems and furbelows, to visit the houses
of the neighbouring gentry. Her pen made instant
report of these excursions. She recorded how Lady
C. R. “did beat her husband in a public assembly”;
Sir F. O. “I am sorry to hear hath undervalued him¬
self so much below his birth and wealth as to marry
his kitchen-maid”; “Miss P. I. has become a sancti¬
fied soul, a spiritual sister, she has left curling her
hair, black patches are become abominable to her,

[no]

THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE

laced shoes and Galoshoes are steps to pride — she
asked me what posture I thought was the best to be
used in prayer”. Her answer was probably unac¬
ceptable. “I shall not rashly go there again”, she
says of one such “gossip-making”. She was not, we
may hazard, a welcome guest or an altogether hos¬
pitable hostess. She had a way of “bragging of
myself” which frightened visitors so that they left,
nor was she sorry to see them go. Indeed, Welbeck
was the best place for her, and her own company the
most congenial, with the amiable Duke wandering in
and out, with his plays and his speculations, always
ready to answer a question or refute a slander. Per¬
haps it was this solitude that led her, chaste as she was
in conduct, to use language which in time to come
much perturbed Sir Egerton Brydges. She used, he
complained, “expressions and images of extraordinary
coarseness as flowing from a female of high rank
brought up in courts”. He forgot that this particular
female had long ceased to frequent the Court; she
consorted chiefly with fairies; and her friends were
among the dead. Naturally, then, her language was
coarse. Nevertheless, though her philosophies are
futile, and her plays intolerable, and her verses mainly
dull, the vask bulk of the Duchess is leavened by a
vein of authentic fire. One cannot help following the
lure of her erratic and lovable personality as it me¬
anders and twinkles through page after page. There
is something noble and Quixotic and high-spirited, as
well as crack-brained and bird-witted, about her. Her
simplicity is so open; her intelligence so active; her

[in]

THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE

sympathy with fairies and animals so true and tender.
She has the freakishness of an elf, the irresponsibility
of some non-human creature, its heartlessness, and its
charm. And although “they”, those terrible critics
who had sneered and jeered at her ever since, as a
shy girl, she had not dared look her tormentors in the
face at Court, continued to mock, few of her critics,
after all, had the wit to trouble about the nature of
the universe, or cared a straw for the sufferings of the
hunted hare, or longed, as she did, to talk to some
one “of Shakespeare’s fools”. Now, at any rate, the
laugh is not all on their side.

But laugh they did. When the rumour spread
that the crazy Duchess was coming up from Welbeck
to pay her respects at Court, people crowded the
streets to look at her, and the curiosity of Mr. Pepys
twice brought him to wait in the Park to see her pass.
But the pressure of the crowd about her coach was
too great. He could only catch a glimpse of her in
her silver coach with her footmen all in velvet, a
velvet cap on her head, and her hair about her ears.
He could only see for a moment between the white
curtains the face of “a very comely woman”, and on
she drove through the crowd of staring Cockneys, all
pressing to catch a glimpse of that romantic lady, who
stands in the picture at Welbeck, with large melan¬
choly eyes, and something fastidious and fantastic in
her bearing, touching a table with the tips of long
pointed fingers in the calm assurance of immortal
fame.

[112]

Rambling Round Evelyn

Should you wish to make sure that your birthday
will be celebrated three hundred years hence, your
best course is undoubtedly to keep a diary. Only first
be certain that you have the courage to lock your
genius in a private book and the humour to gloat
over a fame that will be yours only in the grave.
For the good diarist writes either for himself alone or
for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every
secret and justly weigh every motive. For such an
audience there is need neither of affectation nor of
restraint. Sincerity is what they ask, detail, volume;
skill with the pen comes in conveniently, but bril¬
liance is not necessary; genius is a hindrance even;
and should you know your business and do it man¬
fully, posterity will let you off mixing with great
men, reporting famous affairs, or having lain with the
first ladies in the land.

The diary, for whose sake we are remembering the
three hundredth anniversary of the birth of John
Evelyn,1 is a case in point. It is sometimes composed
like a memoir, sometimes jotted down like a calendar ;
but he never used its pages to reveal the secrets of
his heart, and all that he wrote might have been read
aloud in the evening with a calm conscience to his
children. If we wonder, then, why we still trouble

1 Written in 1920.

RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN

to read what we must consider the uninspired work
of a good man we have to confess, first that diaries
are always diaries, books, that is, that we read in
convalescence, on horseback, in the grip of death;
second, that this reading, about which so many fine
things have been said, is for the most part mere
dreaming and idling; lying in a chair with a book;
watching the butterflies on the dahlias; a profitless
occupation which no critic has taken the trouble to
investigate, and on whose behalf only the moralist
can find a good word to say. For he will allow it to
be an innocent employment; and happiness, he will
add, though derived from trivial sources, has prob¬
ably done more to prevent human beings from chang¬
ing their religions and killing their kings than either
philosophy or the pulpit.

It may be well, indeed, before reading much fur¬
ther in Evelyn’s book, to decide where it is that our
modern view of happiness differs from his. Igno¬
rance, surely, ignorance is at the bottom of it; his
ignorance, and our comparative erudition. No one
can read the story of Evelyn’s foreign travels without
envying in the first place his simplicity of mind, in
the second his activity. To take a simple example
of the difference between us — that butterfly will sit
motionless on the dahlia while the gardener trundles
his barrow past it, but let him flick the wings with
the shadow of a rake, and off it flies, up it goes, in¬
stantly on the alert. So, we may reflect, a butterfly
sees but does not hear; and here no doubt

[114]

we are

RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN

much on a par with Evelyn. But as for going into
the house to fetch a knife and with that knife dis¬
secting a Red Admiral’s head, as Evelyn would have
done, no sane person in the twentieth century would
entertain such a project for a second. Individually
we may know as little as Evelyn, but collectively we
know so much that there is little incentive to venture
on private discoveries. We seek the encyclopaedia,
not the scissors; and know in two minutes not only
more than was known to Evelyn in his lifetime, but
that the mass of knowledge is so vast that it is scarcely
worth while to possess a single crumb. Ignorant, yet
justly confident that with his own hands he might
advance not merely his private knowledge but the
knowledge of mankind, Evelyn dabbled in all the
arts and sciences, ran about the Continent for ten
years, gazed with unflagging gusto upon hairy women
and rational dogs, and drew inferences and framed
speculations which are now only to be matched by
listening to the talk of old women round the village
pump. The moon, they say, is so much larger than
usual this autumn that no mushrooms will grow, and
the carpenter’s wife will be brought to bed of twins.
So Evelyn, Fellow of the Royal Society, a gentleman
of the highest culture and intelligence, carefully
noted all comets and portents, and thought it a sin¬
ister omen when a whale came up the Thames. In
1658, too, a whale had been seen. “That year died
Cromwell.” Nature, it seems, was determined to
stimulate the devotion of her seventeenth-century ad-

[ns]

RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN

mirers by displays of violence and eccentricity from
which she now refrains. There were storms, floods,
and droughts; the Thames frozen hard; comets flaring
in the sky. If a cat so much as kittened in Evelyn’s
bed the kitten was inevitably gifted with eight legs,
six ears, two bodies, and two tails.

But to return to happiness. It sometimes appears
that if there is an insoluble difference between our
ancestors and ourselves it is that we draw our hap¬
piness from different sources. We rate the same
things at different values. Something of this we may
ascribe to their ignorance and our knowledge. But
are we to suppose that ignorance alters the nerves
and the affections? Are we to believe that it would
have been an intolerable penance for us to live fa¬
miliarly with the Elizabethans? Should we have
found it necessary to leave the room because of
Shakespeare’s habits, and to have refused Queen
Elizabeth’s invitation to dinner? Perhaps so. For
Evelyn was a sober man of unusual refinement, and
yet he pressed into a torture chamber as we crowd to
see the lions fed.

. . . they first bound his wrists with a strong rope or small
cable, and one end of it to an iron ring made fast to the wall
about four feet from the floor, and then his feet with another
cable, fastened about five feet farther than his utmost length
to another ring on the floor of the room. Thus suspended,
and yet lying but aslant, they slid a horse of wood under the
rope which bound his feet, which so exceedingly stiffened it,
as severed the fellow’s joints in miserable sort, drawing him

[n6]

RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN

out at length in an extraordinary manner, he having only a
pair of linen drawers upon his naked body . . .

And so on. Evelyn watched this to the end, and then
remarked that “the spectacle was so uncomfortable
that I was not able to stay the sight of another”, as
we might say that the lions growl so loud and the
sight of raw meat is so unpleasant that we will now
visit the penguins. Allowing for his discomfort, there
is enough discrepancy between his view of pain and
ours to make us wonder whether we see any fact with
the same eyes, marry any woman from the same mo¬
tives, or judge any conduct by the same standards.
To sit passive when muscles tore and bones cracked,
not to flinch when the wooden horse was raised
higher and the executioner fetched a horn and poured
two buckets of water down the man’s throat, to suffer
this iniquity on a suspicion of robbery which the man
denied — all this seems to put Evelyn in one of those
cages where we still mentally seclude the riff-raff of
Whitechapel. Only it is obvious that we have some¬
how got it wrong. If we could maintain that our
susceptibility to suffering and love of justice were
proof that all our humane instincts were as highly
developed as these, then we could say that the world
improves, and we with it. But let us get on with the
diary.

In 1652, when it seemed that things had settled
down unhappily enough, “all being entirely in the
rebels’ hands”, Evelyn returned to England with his

[ii 7]

RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN

wife, his Tables of Veins and Arteries, his Venetian
glass and the rest of his curiosities, to lead the life of
a country gentleman of strong Royalist sympathies
at Deptford. What with going to church and going
to town, settling his accounts and planting his garden
— “I planted the orchard at Sayes Court; new moon,
wind west” — his time was spent much as ours is. Rut
there was one difference which it is difficult to illus¬
trate by a single quotation, because the evidence is
scattered all about in little insignificant phrases. The
general effect of them is that he used his eyes. The
visible world was always close to him. The visible
world has receded so far from us that to hear all this
talk of buildings and gardens, statues and carving,
as if the look of things assailed one out of doors as
well as in, and were not confined to a few small can¬
vases hung upon the wall, seems strange. No doubt
there are a thousand excuses for us; but hitherto we
have been finding excuses for him. Wherever there
was a picture to be seen by Julio Romano, Polydore,
Guido, Raphael, or Tintoretto, a finely-built house, a
prospect, or a garden nobly designed, Evelyn stopped
his coach to look at it, and opened his diary to record
his opinion. On August 27 Evelyn, with Dr. Wren
and others, was in St. Paul’s surveying “the general
decay of that ancient and venerable church”; held
with Dr. Wren another judgement from the rest; and
had a mind to build it' with “a noble cupola, a form
of church building not as yet known in England but
of wonderful grace”, in which Dr. Wren concurred.

[nS]

RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN

Six days later the Fire of London altered their plans.
It was Evelyn again who, walking by himself,
chanced to look in at the window of “a poor solitary
thatched house in a field in our parish”, there saw a
young man carving at a crucifix, was overcome with
an enthusiasm which does him the utmost credit, and
carried Grinling Gibbons and his carving to Court.

Indeed, it is all very well to be scrupulous about
the sufferings of worms and sensitive to the dues of
servant girls, but how pleasant also if, with shut eyes,
one could call up street after street of beautiful
houses. A flower is red; the apples rosy-gilt in the
afternoon sun; a picture has charm, especially as it
displays the character of a grandfather and dignifies
a family descended from such a scowl; but these are
scattered fragments — little relics of beauty in a world
that has grown indescribably drab. To our charge
of cruelty Evelyn might well reply by pointing to
Bayswater and the purlieus of Clapham; and if he
should assert that nothing now has character or con¬
viction, that no farmer in England sleeps with an
open coffin at his bedside to remind him of death,
we could not retort effectually offhand. True, we
like the country. Evelyn never looked at the sky.

But to return. After the Restoration Evelyn
emerged in full possession of a variety of accomplish¬
ments which in our time of specialists seems remark¬
able enough. He was employed on public business;
he was Secretary to the Royal Society; he wrote
plays and poems; he was the first authority upon

[H9]

RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN

trees and gardens in England; he submitted a design
for the rebuilding of London ; he went into the ques¬
tion of smoke and its abatement — the lime trees in
St. James’s Park being, it is said, the result of his
cogitations; he was commissioned to write a history
of the Dutch war — in short, he completely outdid the
Squire of “The Princess”, whom in many respects he
anticipated —

A lord of fat prize oxen and of sheep,

A raiser of huge melons and of pine,

A patron of some thirty charities,

A pamphleteer on guano and on grain,

A quarter sessions chairman abler none.

All that he was, and shared with Sir Walter another
characteristic which Tennyson does not mention. He
was, we cannot help suspecting, something of a bore,
a little censorious, a little patronising, a little too sure
of his own merits, and a little obtuse to those of other
people. Or what is the quality, or absence of quality,
that checks our sympathies partly, perhaps, it is due
to some inconsistency which it would be harsh to call
by so strong a name as hypocrisy. Though he de¬
plored the vices of his age he could never keep away
from the centre of them. “The luxurious dallying
and profaneness” of the Court, the sight of “Mrs.
Nelly” looking over her garden wall and holding,
“very familiar discourse” with King Charles on the
green walk below, caused him acute disgust; yet he
could never decide to break with the Court and retire

[l20]

RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN

to “my poor but quiet villa”, which was of course
the apple of his eye and one of the show-places in
England. Then, though he loved his daughter Mary,
his grief at her death did not prevent him from count¬
ing the number of empty coaches drawn by six horses
apiece that attended her funeral. His women friends
combined virtue with beauty to such an extent that
we can hardly credit them with wit into the bargain.
Poor Mrs. Godolphin at least, whom he celebrated in
a sincere and touching biography, “loved to be at
funerals” and chose habitually “the dryest and lean¬
est morsels of meat”, which may be the habits of an
angel but do not present her friendship with Evelyn
in an alluring light. But it is Pepys who sums up
our case against Evelyn ; Pepys who said of him after
a long morning’s entertainment: “In fine a most ex¬
cellent person he is and must be allowed a little for
a little conceitedness ; but he may well be so, being a
man so much above others”. The words exactly hit
the mark, “A most excellent person he was”; but a
little conceited.

Pepys it is who prompts us to another reflection,
inevitable, unnecessary, perhaps unkind. Evelyn was
no genius. His writing is opaque rather than trans¬
parent; we see no depths through it, nor any very
secret movements of mind or heart. He can neither
make us hate a regicide nor love Mrs. Godolphin be¬
yond reason. But he writes a diary; and he writes
it supremely well. Even as we drowse, somehow or
other the bygone gentleman sets up, through three

[121]

RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN

centuries, a perceptible tingle of communication, so
that without laying stress on anything in particular,
stopping to dream, stopping to laugh, stopping merely
to look, we are yet taking notice all the time. His
garden for example — how delightful is his disparage¬
ment of it, and how acid his criticism of the gardens
of others! Then, we may be sure, the hens at Saves
Court laid the very best eggs in England, and when
the Tsar drove a wheelbarrow through his hedge what
a catastrophe it was, and we can guess how Mrs.
Evelyn dusted and polished, and how Evelyn himself
grumbled, and how punctilious and efficient and trust¬
worthy he was, how prone to give advice, how ready
to read his own works aloud, and how affectionate,
withal, lamenting bitterly but not effusively, for the
man with the long-drawn sensitive face was never
that, the death of the little prodigy Richard, and
recording how “after evening prayers was my child
buried near the rest of his brothers — my very dear
children.” He was not an artist; no phrases linger
in the mind; no paragraphs build themselves up in
memory; but as an artistic method this of going on
with the day’s story circumstantially, bringing in
people who will never be mentioned again, leading
up to crises which never take place, introducing Sir
Thomas Browne but never letting him speak, has its
fascination. All through his pages good men, bad
men, celebrities, nonentities are coming into the room
and going out again. The greater number we scarcely
notice; the door shuts upon them and they disappear.

[122]

RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN

But now and again the sight of a vanishing coat-tail
suggests more than a whole figure sitting still in a full
light. They have struck no attitude, arranged no
mantle. Little they think that for three hundred
years and more they will be looked at in the act of
jumping a gate, or observing, like the old Marquis
of Argyle, that the turtle doves in the aviary are
owls. Our eyes wander from one to the other; our
affections settle here or there — on hot-tempered Cap¬
tain Wray, for instance, who was choleric, had a dog
that killed a goat, was for shooting the goat’s owner,
was for shooting his horse when it fell down a preci¬
pice; on Mr. Saladine; on Mr. Saladine’s beautiful
daughter; on Captain Wray lingering at Geneva to
make love to Mr. Saladine’s daughter; on Evelyn
himself most of all, grown old, walking in his garden
at Wooton, his sorrows smoothed out, his grandson
doing him credit, the Latin quotations falling pat
from his lips, his trees flourishing, and the butterflies
flying and flaunting on his dahlias too.

[123]

Defoe 1

The fear which attacks the recorder of centenaries
lest he should find himself measuring a diminishing
spectre and forced to foretell its approaching dissolu¬
tion is not only absent in the case of Robinson Crusoe
but the mere thought of it is ridiculous. It may be true
that Robinson Crusoe is two hundred years of age upon
the twenty-fifth of April 1919, but far from raising the
familiar speculations as to whether people now read
it and will continue to read it, the effect of the bi¬
centenary is to make us marvel that Robinson Crusoe ,
the perennial and immortal, should have been in ex¬
istence so short a time as that. The book resembles one
of the anonymous productions of the race itself rather
than the effort of a single mind ; and as for celebrating
its centenary we should as soon think of celebrating
the centenaries of Stonehenge itself. Something of
this we may attribute to the fact that we have all had
Robinson Crusoe read aloud to us as children, and were
thus much in the same state of mind towards Defoe
and his story that the Greeks were in towards Homer.
It never occurred to us that there was such a person
as Defoe, and to have been told that Robinson Crusoe
was the work of a man with a pen in his hand would
either have disturbed us unpleasantly or meant noth¬
ing at all. The impressions of childhood are those that

1 Written in 1919.

[125]

DEFOE

last longest and cut deepest. It still seems that the
name of Daniel Defoe has no right to appear upon the
title-page of Robinson Crusoe , and if we celebrate
the bi-centenary of the book we are making a slightly
unnecessary allusion to the fact that, like Stonehenge,
it is still in existence.

The great fame of the book has done its author
some injustice; for while it has given him a kind of
anonymous glory it has obscured the fact that he was
a writer of other works which, it is safe to assert, were
not read aloud to us as children. Thus when the Edi¬
tor of the Christian World in the year 1870 appealed
to “the boys and girls of England” to erect a monu¬
ment upon the grave of Defoe, which a stroke of light¬
ning had mutilated, the marble was inscribed to the
memory of the author of Robinson Crusoe. No men¬
tion was made of Moll Flanders. Considering the
topics which are dealt with in that book, and in Rox¬
ana, Captain Singleton , Colonel Jack and the rest, we
need not be surprised, though we may be indignant,
at the omission. We may agree with Mr. Wright, the
biographer of Defoe, that these “are not works for the
drawing-room table”. But unless we consent to make
that useful piece of furniture the final arbiter of taste,
we must deplore the fact that their superficial coarse¬
ness, or the universal celebrity of Robinson Crusoe , has
led them to be far less widely famed than they deserve.
On any monument worthy of the name of monument
the names of Moll Flanders and Roxana , at least,
should be carved as deeply as the name of Defoe.

[126]

DEFOE

They stand among the few English novels which we
can call indisputably great. The occasion of the bi¬
centenary of their more famous companion may well
lead us to consider in what their greatness, which has
so much in common with his, may be found to consist.

Defoe was an elderly man when he turned novelist,
many years the predecessor of Richardson and Field¬
ing, and one of the first indeed to shape the novel and
launch it on its way. But it is unnecessary to labour
the fact of his precedence, except that he came to his
novel-writing with certain conceptions about the art
which he derived partly from being himself one of the
first to practise it. The novel had to justify its ex¬
istence by telling a true story and preaching a sound
moral. “This supplying a story by invention is cer¬
tainly a most scandalous crime,” he wrote. “It is a
sort of lying that makes a great hole in the heart, in
which by degrees a habit of lying enters in.” Either in
the preface or in the text of each of his works, there¬
fore, he takes pains to insist that he has not used his
invention at all but has depended upon facts, and that
his purpose has been the highly moral desire to con¬
vert the vicious or to warn the innocent. Happily
these were principles that tallied very well with his
natural disposition and endowments. Facts had been
drilled into him by sixty years of varying fortunes be¬
fore he turned his experience to account in fiction. “I
have some time ago summed up the Scenes of my life
in this distich,” he wrote:

[127]

DEFOE

No man has tasted differing fortunes more,

And thirteen times I have been rich and poor.

He had spent eighteen months in Newgate and talked
with thieves, pirates, highwaymen, and coiners before
he wrote the history of Moll Flanders. But to have
facts thrust upon you by dint of living and accident is
one thing; to swallow them voraciously and retain the
imprint of them indelibly, is another./ It is not merely
that Defoe knew the stress of poverty and had talked
with the victims of it, but that the unsheltered life, ex¬
posed to circumstances and forced to shift for itself,
appealed to him imaginatively as the right matter for
his art. In the first pages of each of his great novels
he reduces his hero or heroine to such a state of un¬
friended misery that their existence must be a con¬
tinued struggle, and their survival at all the result of
luck and their own exertions. Moll Flanders was born
in Newgate of a criminal mother; Captain Singleton
was stolen as a child and sold to the gipsies; Colonel
Jack, though “born a gentleman, was put ’prentice to
a pickpocket”; Roxana starts under better auspices,
but, having married at fifteen, she sees her husband go
bankrupt and is left with five children in “a condition
the most deplorable that words can express”.

Thus each of these boys and girls has the world
to begin and the battle to fight for himself. The situ¬
ation thus created was entirely to Defoe’s liking.
From her very birth or with half a year’s respite at
most, Moll Flanders, the most notable of them, is

[128]

DEFOE

goaded by “that worst of devils, poverty”, forced to
earn her living as soon as she can sew, driven from
place to place, making no demands upon her creator
for the subtle domestic atmosphere which he was un¬
able to supply, but drawing upon him for all he knew
of strange people and customs. From the outset the
burden of proving her right to exist is laid upon her.
She has to depend entirely upon her own wits and
judgement, and to deal with each emergency as it
arises by a rule-of-thumb morality which she has
forged in her own head. The briskness of the story
is due partly to the fact that having transgressed the
accepted laws at a very early age she has henceforth
the freedom of the outcast. The one impossible event
is that she should settle down in comfort and security.
But from the first the peculiar genius of the author
asserts itself, and avoids the obvious danger of the
novel of adventure. He makes us understand that
Moll Flanders was a woman on her own account and
not only material for a succession of adventures. In
proof of this she begins, as Roxana also begins, by
falling passionately, if unfortunately, in love. That
she must rouse herself and marry some one else and
look very closely to her settlements and prospects is
no slight upon her passion, but to be laid to the charge
of her birth; and, like all Defoe’s women, she is a
person of robust understanding. Since she makes no
scruple of telling lies when they serve her purpose,
there is something undeniable about her truth when
she speaks it. She has no time to waste upon the re-

[129]

DEFOE

finements of personal affection; one tear is dropped,
one moment of despair allowed, and then “on with
the story”. She has a spirit that loves to breast the
storm. She delights in the exercise of her own powers.
When she discovers that the man she has married in
Virginia is her own brother she is violently disgusted ;
she insists upon leaving him; but as soon as she sets
foot in Bristol, “I took the diversion of going to Bath,
for as I was still far from being old so my humour,
which was always gay, continued so to an extreme”.
Heartless she is not, nor can any one charge her with
levity; but life delights her, and a heroine who lives
has us all in tow. Moreover, her ambition has that
slight strain of imagination in it which puts it in the
category of the noble passions. Shrewd and practical
of necessity, she is yet haunted by a desire for romance
and for the quality which to her perception makes
a man a gentleman. “It was really a true gallant
spirit he was of, and it was the more grievous to me.
’Tis something of relief even to be undone by a man
of honour rather than by a scoundrel,” she writes
when she had misled a highwayman as to the extent of
her fortune. It is in keeping with this temper that
she should be proud of her final partner because he
refuses to work when they reach the plantations but
prefers hunting, and that she should take pleasure
in buying him wigs and silver-hilted swords “to make
him appear, as he really was, a very fine gentleman”.
Her very love of hot weather is in keeping, and the
passion with which she kissed the ground that her son

[130]

DEFOE

had trod on, and her noble tolerance of every kind of
fault so long as it is not “complete baseness of spirit,
imperious, cruel, and relentless when uppermost, abject
and low-spirited when down”. For the rest of the
world she has nothing but good-will.

Since the list of the qualities and graces of this
seasoned old sinner is by no means exhausted we can
well understand how it was that Borrow’s apple-
woman on London Bridge called her “blessed Mary”
and valued her book above all the apples on her stall ;
and that Borrow, taking the book deep into the booth,
read till his eyes ached. But we dwell upon such
signs of character only by way of proof that the creator
of Moll Flanders was not, as he has been accused of
being, a mere journalist and literal recorder of facts
with no conception of the nature of psychology. It
is true that his characters take shape and substance
of their own accord, as if in despite of the author and
not altogether to his liking. He never lingers or
stresses any point of subtlety or pathos, but presses
on imperturbably as if they came there without his
knowledge. A touch of imagination, such as that
when the Prince sits by his son’s cradle and Roxana
observes how “he loved to look at it when it was
asleep”, seems to mean much more to us than to him.
After the curiously modern dissertation upon the need
of communicating matters of importance to a second
person lest, like the thief in Newgate, we should talk
of it in our sleep, he apologises for his digression.
He seems to have taken his characters so deeply into

[i3i]

DEFOE

his mind that he lived them without exactly knowing
how; and, like all unconscious artists, he leaves more
gold in his work than his own generation was able
to bring to the surface.

The interpretation that we put on his characters
might therefore well have puzzled him. We find for
ourselves meanings which he was careful to disguise
even from himself. Thus it comes about that we
admire Moll Flanders far more than we blame her.
Nor can we believe that Defoe had made up his mind
as to the precise degree of her guilt, or was unaware
that in considering the lives of the abandoned he
raised many deep questions and hinted, if he did not
state, answers quite at variance with his professions
of belief. From the evidence supplied by his essay
upon the “Education of Women” we know that he
had thought deeply and much in advance of his age
upon the capacities of women, which he rated very
high, and the injustice done to them, which he rated
very harsh.

I have often, thought of it as one of the most barbarous
customs in the world, considering us as a civilised and a
Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to
women. We reproach the sex every day with folly and im¬
pertinence; which I am confident, had they the advantages of
education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than
ourselves.

The advocates of women’s rights would hardly care,
perhaps, to claim Moll Flanders and Roxana among
their patron saints ; and yet it is clear that Defoe not

[132]

DEFOE

only intended them to speak some very modern doc¬
trines upon the subject, but placed them in circum¬
stances where their peculiar hardships are displayed
in such a way as to elicit our sympathy. Courage, said
Moll Flanders, was what women needed, and the
power to “stand their ground”; and at once gave
practical demonstration of the benefits that would
result. Roxana, a lady of the same profession, argues
more subtly against the slavery of marriage. She “had
started a new thing in the world” the merchant told
her; “it was a way of arguing contrary to the general
practise”. But Defoe is the last writer to be guilty
of bald preaching. Roxana keeps our attention be¬
cause she is blessedly unconscious that she is in any
good sense an example to her sex and is thus at liberty
to own that part of her argument is “of an elevated
strain which was really not in my thoughts at first,
at all”. The knowledge of her own frailties and the
honest questioning of her own motives, which that
knowledge begets, have the happy result of keeping
her fresh and human when the martyrs and pioneers of
so many problem novels have shrunken and shrivelled
to the pegs and props of their respective creeds.

But the claim of Defoe upon our admiration does
not rest upon the fact that he can be shown to have
anticipated some of the views of Meredith, or to have
written scenes which (the odd suggestion occurs) might
have been turned into plays by Ibsen. Whatever his
ideas upon the position of women, they are an inci¬
dental result of his chief virtue, which is that he deals

[133]

DEFOE

with the important and lasting side of things and not
with the passing and trivial. He is often dull. He
can imitate the matter-of-fact precision of a scien¬
tific traveller until we wonder that his pen could trace
or his brain conceive what has not even the excuse of
truth to soften its dryness. He leaves out the whole
of vegetable nature, and a large part of human nature.
All this we may admit, though we have to admit de¬
fects as grave in many writers whom we call great.
But that does not impair the peculiar merit of what
remains. Having at the outset limited his scope and
confined his ambitions he achieves a truth of insight
which is far rarer and more enduring than the truth of
fact which he professed to make his aim. Moll Flan¬
ders and her friends recommended themselves to him
not because they were, as we should say, “picturesque” ;
nor, as he affirmed, because they were examples of evil
living by which the public might profit. It was their
natural veracity, bred in them by a life of hardship,
that excited his interest. For them there were no
excuses; no kindly shelter obscured their motives.
Poverty was their taskmaster. Defoe did not pro¬
nounce more than a judgement of the lips upon their
failings. But their courage and resource and tenacity
delighted him. He found their society full of good
talk, and pleasant stories, and faith in each other,
and morality of a home-made kind. Their fortunes
had that infinite variety which he praised and relished
and beheld with wonder in his own life. These men
and women, above all, were free to talk openly of the

[134]

DEFOE

passions and desires which have moved men and women
since the beginning of time, and thus even now they
keep their vitality undiminished. There is a dignity in
everything that is looked at openly. Even the sordid
subject of money, which plays so large a part in
their histories, becomes not sordid but tragic when it
stands not for ease and consequence but for honour,
honesty and life itself. You may object that Defoe is
humdrum, but never that he is engrossed with petty
things.

He belongs, indeed, to the school of the great plain
writers, whose work is founded upon a knowledge of
what is most persistent, though not most seductive, in
human nature. The view of London from Hungerford
Bridge, grey, serious, massive, and full of the subdued
stir of traffic and business, prosaic if it were not for the
masts of the ships and the towers and domes of the city,
brings him to mind. The tattered girls with violets in
their hands at the street corners, and the old weather¬
beaten women patiently displaying their matches and
bootlaces beneath the shelter of arches, seem like char¬
acters from his books. He is of the school of Crabbe,
and of Gissing, and not merely a fellow pupil in the
same stern place of learning, but its founder and mas¬
ter.

[135]

Addison 1

In July, 1843, Lord Macaulay pronounced the opin¬
ion that Joseph Addison had enriched our literature
with compositions “that will live as long as the English
language”. But when Lord Macaulay pronounced an
opinion it was not merely an opinion. Even now, at
a distance of seventy-six years, the words seem to issue
from the mouth of the chosen representative of the
people. There is an authority about them, a sonority,
a sense of responsibility, which put us in mind of a
Prime Minister making a proclamation on behalf of
a great empire rather than of a journalist writing about
a deceased man of letters for a magazine. The article
upon Addison is, indeed, one of the most vigorous of
the famous essays. Florid, and at the same time ex¬
tremely solid, the phrases seem to build up a monu¬
ment, at once square and lavishly festooned with orna¬
ment, which should serve Addison for shelter so long as
one stone of Westminster Abbey stands upon another.
Yet, though we may have read and admired this par¬
ticular essay times out of number (as we say when we
have read anything three times over), it has never
occurred to us, strangely enough, to believe that it is
true. That is apt to happen to the admiring reader of
Macaulay’s essays. While delighting in their richness,
force, and variety, and finding every judgement, how-

1 Written in 1919.

ADDISON

ever emphatic, proper in its place, it seldom occurs to
us to connect these sweeping assertions and undeniable
convictions with anything so minute as a human being.
So it is with Addison. “If we wish”, Macaulay writes,
“to find anything more vivid than Addison’s best por¬
traits, we must go either to Shakespeare or to Cer¬
vantes”. “We have not the least doubt that if Addi¬
son had written a novel on an extensive plan it would
have been superior to any that we possess.” His essays,
again, “fully entitle him to the rank of a great poet” ;
and, to complete the edifice, we have Voltaire pro¬
claimed “the prince of buffoons”, and together with
Swift forced to stoop so low that Addison takes rank
above them both as a humorist.

Examined separately, such flourishes of ornament
look grotesque enough, but in their place — such is the
persuasive power of design — they are part of the dec¬
oration; they complete the monument. Whether Addi¬
son or another is interred within, it is a very fine tomb.
But now that two centuries have passed since the real
body of Addison was laid by night under the Abbey
floor, we are, through no merit of our own, partially
qualified to test the first of the flourishes on that ficti¬
tious tombstone to which, though it may be empty, we
have done homage, in a formal kind of way, these
sixty-seven years. The compositions of Addison will
live as long as the English language. Since every mo¬
ment brings proof that our mother tongue is more lusty
and lively than sorts with complete sedateness or chas¬
tity, we need only concern ourselves with the vitality of

[138]

ADDISON

Addison. Neither lusty nor lively is the adjective we
should apply to the present condition of the Tatler and
the Spectator. To take a rough test, it is possible to
discover how many people in the course of a year bor¬
row Addison’s works from the public library, and a
particular instance affords us the not very encouraging
information that during nine years two people yearly
take out the first volume of the Spectator. The second
volume is less in request than the first. The inquiry is
not a cheerful one. From certain marginal comments
and pencil marks it seems that these rare devotees seek
out only the famous passages and, as their habit is,
score what we are bold enough to consider the least
admirable phrases. No; if Addison lives at all, it is
not in the public libraries. It is in libraries that are
markedly private, secluded, shaded by lilac trees and
brown with folios, that he still draws his faint, regular
breath. If any man or woman is going to solace him¬
self with a page of Addison before the June sun is out
of the sky to-day, it is in some such pleasant retreat
as this.

Yet all over England at intervals, perhaps wide ones,
we may be sure that there are people engaged in read¬
ing Addison, whatever the year or season. For Addi¬
son is very well worth reading. The temptation to
read Pope on Addison, Macaulay on Addison, Thack¬
eray on Addison, Johnson on Addison rather than Ad¬
dison himself is to be resisted, for you will find, if you
study the Tatler and the Spectator , glance at Cato ,
and run through the remainder of the six moderate-

[139]

ADDISON

sized volumes, that Addison is neither Pope’s Addison
nor anybody else’s Addison, but a separate, independ¬
ent individual still capable of casting a clear-cut shape
of himself upon the consciousness, turbulent and dis¬
tracted as it is, of nineteen hundred and nineteen. It
is true that the fate of the lesser shades is always a
little precarious. They are so easily obscured or dis¬
torted. It seems so often scarcely worth while to go
through the cherishing and humanising process which
is necessary to get into touch with a writer of the sec¬
ond class who may, after all, have little to give us.
The earth is crusted over them; their features are
obliterated, and perhaps it is not a head of the best
period that we rub clean in the end, but only the chip
of an old pot. The chief difficulty with the lesser
writers, however, is not only the effort. It is that our
standards have changed. The things that they like are
not the things that we like; and as the charm of their
writing depends much more upon taste than upon con¬
viction, a change of manners is often quite enough to
put us out of touch altogether. That is one of the
most troublesome barriers between ourselves and Addi¬
son. He attached great importance to certain quali¬
ties. He had a very precise notion of what we are used
to call “niceness” in man or woman. He was ex¬
tremely fond of saying that men ought not to be athe¬
ists, and that women ought not to wear large petti¬
coats. This directly inspires in us not so much a sense
of distaste as a sense of difference. Dutifully, if at.

[140]

ADDISON

all, we strain our imaginations to conceive the kind of
audience to whom these precepts were addressed. The
Tatler was published in 1709; the Spectator a year or
two later. What was the state of England at that par¬
ticular moment? Why was Addison so anxious to
insist upon the necessity of a decent and cheerful re¬
ligious belief? Why did he so constantly, and in the
main kindly, lay stress upon the foibles of women and
their reform? Why was he so deeply impressed with
the evils of party government? Any historian will ex¬
plain ; but it is always a misfortune to have to call in
the services of any historian. A writer should give us
direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured
into the wine. As it is, we can only feel that these
counsels are addressed to ladies in hoops and gentle¬
men in wigs — a vanished audience which has learnt its
lesson and gone its way and the preacher with it. We
can only smile and marvel and perhaps admire the
clothes.

And that is not the way to read. To be thinking
that dead people deserved these censures and admired
this morality, judged the eloquence, which we find so
frigid, sublime, the philosophy to us so superficial,
profound, to take a collector’s joy in such signs of
antiquity, is to treat literature as if it were a broken
jar of undeniable age but doubtful beauty, to be stood
in a cabinet behind glass doors. The charm which still
makes Cato very readable is much of this nature.
When Syphax exclaims,

[Hi]

ADDISON

So, where our wide Numidian wastes extend,

Sudden, th’ impetuous hurricanes descend,

Wheel through the air, in circling eddies play,

Tear up the sands, and sweep whole plains away,

The helpless traveller, with wild surprise,

Sees the dry desert all around him rise,

And smother’d in the dusty whirlwind dies,

we cannot help imagining the thrill in the crowded
theatre, the feathers nodding emphatically on the
ladies’ heads, the gentlemen leaning forward to tap
their canes, and every one exclaiming to his neighbour
how vastly fine it is and crying “Bravo!” But how
can we be excited4? And so with Bishop Hurd and his
notes — his “finely observed”, his “wonderfully exact,
both in the sentiment and expression”, his serene con¬
fidence that when “the present humour of idolising
Shakespeare is over”, the time will come when Cato
is “supremely admired by all candid and judicious
critics”. This is all very amusing and productive of
pleasant fancies, both as to the faded frippery of our
ancestors’ minds and the bold opulence of our own.
But it is not the intercourse of equals, let alone that
other kind of intercourse, which as it makes us con¬
temporary with the author, persuades us that his
object is our own. Occasionally in Cato one may pick
up a few lines that are not obsolete; but for the most
part the tragedy which Dr. Johnson thought “unques¬
tionably the noblest production of Addison’s genius”
has become collector’s literature.

Perhaps most readers approach the essays also with

[142]

ADDISON

some suspicion as to the need of condescension in their
minds. The question to be asked is whether Addison,
attached as he was to certain standards of gentility,
morality, and taste, has not become one of those people
of exemplary character and charming urbanity who
must never be talked to about anything more exciting
than the weather. We have some slight suspicion that
the Spectator and the Taller are nothing but talk,
couched in perfect English, about the number of fine
days this year compared with the number of wet the
year before. The difficulty of getting on to equal terms
with him is shown by the little fable which he intro¬
duces into one of the early numbers of the Tatler , of
"a young gentleman, of moderate understanding, but
great vivacity, who . . . had got a little smattering of
knowledge, just enough to make an atheist or a free¬
thinker, but not a philosopher, or a man of sense”.
This young gentleman visits his father in the country,
and proceeds “to enlarge the narrowness of the
country notions; in which he succeeded so well, that
he had seduced the butler by his table-talk, and stag¬
gered his eldest sister. . . . ’Till one day, talking of
his setting dog . . . said ‘he did not question but Tray
was as immortal as any one of the family’ ; and in the
heat of the argument told his father, that for his own
part, ‘he expected to die like a dog’. Upon which, the
old man, starting up in a very great passion, cried out,
‘Then, sirrah, you shall live like one’; and taking his
cane in his hand, cudgelled him out of his system. This
had so good an effect upon him, that he took up from

[143]

ADDISON

that day, fell to reading good books, and is now a
bencher in the Middle-Temple.” There is a good deal
of Addison in that story: his dislike of “dark and un¬
comfortable prospects”; his respect for “principles
which are the support, happiness, and glory of all pub¬
lic societies, as well as private persons”; his solicitude
for the butler; and his conviction that to read good
books and become a bencher in the Middle Temple is
the proper end for a very vivacious young gentleman.
This Mr. Addison married a countess, “gave his little
senate laws”, and, sending for young Lord Warwick,
made that famous remark about seeing how a Chris¬
tian can die which has fallen upon such evil days that
our sympathies are with the foolish, and perhaps fud¬
dled, young peer rather than with the frigid gentle¬
man, not too far gone for a last spasm of self-com¬
placency, upon the bed.

Let us rub off such incrustations, so far as they are
due to the corrosion of Pope’s wit or the deposit of
mid-Victorian lachrymosity, and see what, for us in
our time, remains. In the first place, there remains the
not despicable virtue, after two centuries of existence,
of being readable. Addison can fairly lay claim to
that; and then, slipped in on the tide of the smooth,
well-turned prose, are little eddies, diminutive water¬
falls, agreeably diversifying the polished surface. We
begin to take note of whims, fancies, peculiarities on
the part of the essayist which light up the prim, impec¬
cable countenance of the moralist and convince us that,
however tightly he may have pursed his lips, his eyes

[144]

ADDISON

are very bright and not so shallow after all. He is alert
to his finger tips. Little muffs, silver garters, fringed
gloves draw his attention; he observes with a keen,
quick glance, not unkindly, and full rather of amuse¬
ment than of censure. To be sure, the age was rich in
follies. Here were coffee-houses packed with politi¬
cians talking of Kings and Emperors and letting their
own small affairs go to ruin. Crowds applauded the
Italian opera every night without understanding a
word of it. Critics discoursed of the unities. Men
gave a thousand pounds for a handful of tulip roots.
As for women — or “the fair sex”, as Addison liked to
call them — their follies were past counting. He did
his best to count them, with a loving particularity
which roused the ill humour of Swift. But he did it
very charmingly, with a natural relish for the task, as
the following passage shows :

I consider woman as a beautiful romantic animal, that may
be adorned with furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds,
ores and silks. The lynx shall cast its skin at her feet to
make her a tippet; the peacock, parrot, and swan, shall pay
contributions to her muff ; the sea shall be searched for shells,
and the rocks for gems ; and every part of nature furnish out
its share towards the embellishment of a creature that is the
most consummate work of it. All this I shall indulge them
in; but as for the petticoat I have been speaking of, I neither
can nor will allow it.

In all these matters Addison was on the side of sense
and taste and civilisation. Of that little fraternity,
often so obscure and yet so indispensable, who in every

[145]

ADDISON

age keep themselves alive to the importance of art and
letters and music, ' watching, discriminating, denounc¬
ing and delighting, Addison was one — distinguished
and strangely contemporary with ourselves. It would
have been, so one imagines, a great pleasure to take
him a manuscript; a great enlightenment, as well as a
great honour, to have his opinion. In spite of Pope,
one fancies that his would have been criticism of the
best order, open-minded and generous to novelty, and
yet, in the final resort, unfaltering in its standards.
The boldness which is a proof of vigour is shown by
his defence of “Chevy Chase”. He had so clear a
notion of what he meant by the “very spirit and soul of
fine writing” as to track it down in an old barbarous
ballad or rediscover it in “that divine work” “Para¬
dise Lost”. Moreover, far from being a connoisseur
only of the still, settled beauties of the dead, he was
aware of the present; a severe critic of its “Gothic
taste”, vigilant in protecting the rights and honours of
the language, and all in favour of simplicity and quiet.
Here we have the Addison of Will’s and Button’s, who,
sitting late into the night and drinking more than was
good for him, gradually overcame his taciturnity and
began to talk. Then he “chained the attention of
every one to him”. “Addison’s conversation”, said
Pope, “had something in it more charming than I have
found in any other man.” One can well believe it,
for his essays at their best preserve the very cadence
of easy yet exquisitely modulated conversation — the
smile checked before it has broadened into laughter,

[146]

ADDISON

the thought lightly turned from frivolity or abstrac¬
tion, the ideas springing, bright, new, various, with the
utmost spontaneity. He seems to speak what comes
into his head, and is never at the trouble of raising his
voice. But he has described himself in the character
of the lute better than any one can do it for him.

The lute is a character directly opposite to the drum, that
sounds very finely by itself, or in a very small concert. Its
notes are exquisitely sweet, and very low, easily drowned in
a multitude of instruments, and even lost among a few, unless
you give a particular attention to it. A lute is seldom heard
in a company of more than five, whereas a drum will show
itself to advantage in an assembly of 500. The lutanists,
therefore, are men of a fine genius, uncommon reflection, great
affability, and esteemed chiefly by persons of a good taste,
who are the only proper judges of so delightful and soft a
melody.

Addison was a lutanist. No praise, indeed, could be
less appropriate than Lord Macaulay’s. To call
Addison on the strength of his essays a great poet, or
to prophesy that if he had written a novel on an exten¬
sive plan it would have been “superior to any that we
possess”, is to confuse him with the drums and trum¬
pets; it is not merely to overpraise his merits, but to
overlook them. Dr. Johnson superbly, and, as his
manner is, once and for all has summed up the quality
of Addison’s poetic genius:

His poetry is first to be considered; of which it must be
confessed that it has not often those felicities of diction which

[147]

ADDISON

give lustre to sentiments, or that vigour of sentiment that ani¬
mates diction; there is little of ardour, vehemence, or trans¬
port; there is very rarely the awfulness of grandeur, and not
very often the splendour of elegance. He thinks justly; but
he thinks faintly.

The Sir Roger de Coverley papers are those which
have the most resemblance, on the surface, to a novel.
But their merit consists in the fact that they do not
adumbrate, or initiate, or anticipate anything; they
exist, perfect, complete, entire in themselves. To read
them as if they were a first hesitating experiment con¬
taining the seed of greatness to come is to miss the
peculiar point of them. They are studies done from
the outside by a quiet spectator. When read together
they compose a portrait of the Squire and his circle all
in characteristic positions — one with his rod, another
with his hounds — but each can be detached from the
rest without damage to the design or harm to himself.
In a novel, where each chapter gains from the one be¬
fore it or adds to the one that follows it, such separa¬
tions would be intolerable. The speed, the intricacy,
the design, would be mutilated. These particular
qualities are perhaps lacking, but nevertheless Addi¬
son’s method has great advantages. Each of these
essays is very highly finished. The characters are de¬
fined by a succession of extremely neat, clean strokes.
Inevitably, where the sphere is so narrow — an essay is
only three or four pages in length — there is not room
for great depth or intricate subtlety. Here, from the
Spectator , is a good example of the witty and decisive

[148]

ADDISON

manner in which Addison strikes out a portrait to fill
the little frame:

Sombrius is one of these sons of sorrow. He thinks himself
obliged in duty to be sad and disconsolate. He looks on a
sudden fit of laughter as a breach of his baptismal vow. An
innocent jest startles him like blasphemy. Tell him of one
who is advanced to a title of honour, he lifts up his hands
and eyes ; describe a public ceremony, he shakes his head ; shew
him a gay equipage, he blesses himself. All the little orna¬
ments of life are pomps and vanities. Mirth is wanton, and
wit profane. He is scandalized at youth for being lively, and
at childhood for being playful. He sits at a christening, or
at a marriage-feast, as at a funeral ; sighs at the conclusion
of a merry story, and grows devout when the rest of the com¬
pany grow pleasant. After all Sombrius is a religious man,
and would have behaved himself very properly, had he lived
when Christianity was under a general persecution.

The novel is not a development from that model,
for the good reason that no development along these
lines is possible. Of its kind such a portrait is per¬
fect; and when we find, scattered up and down the
Spectator and the Tatler , numbers of such little master¬
pieces with fancies and anecdotes in the same style,
some doubt as to the narrowness of such a sphere be¬
comes inevitable. The form of the essay admits of
its own particular perfection; and if anything is per¬
fect the exact dimensions of its perfection become im¬
material. One can scarcely settle whether, on the
whole, one prefers a raindrop to the River Thames.
When we have said all that we can say against them —
that many are dull, others superficial, the allegories

[149]

ADDISON

faded, the piety conventional, the morality trite — there
still remains the fact that the essays of Addison are
perfect essays. Always at the highest point of any art
there comes a moment when everything seems in a con¬
spiracy to help the artist, and his achievement becomes
a natural felicity on his part of which he seems, to a
later age, half-unconscious. So Addison, writing day
after day, essay after essay, knew instinctively and ex¬
actly how to do it. Whether it was. a high thing, or
whether it was a low thing, whether an epic is more
profound or a lyric more passionate, undoubtedly it is
due to Addison that prose is now prosaic — the medium
which makes it possible for people of ordinary intelli¬
gence to communicate their ideas to the world. Addi¬
son is the respectable ancestor of an innumerable
progeny. Pick up the first weekly journal and the arti¬
cle upon the “Delights of Summer” or the “Approach
of Age” will show his influence. But it will also show,
unless the name of Mr. Max Beerbohm, our solitary
essayist, is attached to it, that we have lost the art of
writing essays. What with our views and our virtues,
our passions and profundities, the shapely silver drop,
that held the sky in it and so many bright little visions
of human life, is now nothing but a hold-all knobbed
with luggage packed in a hurry. Even so, the essayist
will make an effort, perhaps without knowing it, to
write like Addison.

In his temperate and reasonable way Addison more
than once amused himself with speculations as to the
fate of his writings. He had a just idea of their na-

[iSo]

ADDISON

ture and value- “I have new-pointed all the batteries
of ridicule”, he wrote. Yet, because so many of his
darts had been directed against ephemeral follies, “ab¬
surd fashions, ridiculous customs, and affected forms
of speech”, the time would come, in a hundred years,
perhaps, when his essays, he thought, would be “like
so many pieces of old plate, where the weight will be
regarded, but the fashion lost”. Two hundred years
have passed ; the plate is worn smooth ; the pattern al¬
most rubbed out ; but the metal is pure silver.

[i5l]

The Lives of the Obscure

Five shillings, perhaps, will secure a life subscription
to this faded, out-of-date, obsolete library, which with
a little help from the rates, is chiefly subsidised from
the shelves of clergymen’s widows, and country gen¬
tlemen inheriting more books than their wives like to
dust. In the middle of the wide airy room, with win¬
dows that look to the sea and let in the shouts of men
crying pilchards for sale on the cobbled street below,
a row of vases stands, in which specimens of the local
flowers droop, each with its name inscribed beneath.
The elderly, the marooned, the bored, drift from news¬
paper to newspaper, or sit holding their heads over
back numbers of The Illustrated London News and
the Wesleyan Chronicle. No one has spoken aloud
here since the room was opened in 1854. The obscure
sleep on the walls, slouching against each other as if
they were too drowsy to stand upright. Their backs
are flaking off; their titles often vanished. Why dis¬
turb their sleep? Why re-open those peaceful graves,
the librarian seems to ask, peering over his spectacles,
and resenting the duty, which indeed has become labo¬
rious, of retrieving from among those nameless tomb¬
stones Nos. 1763, 1080, and 606.

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

I

THE TAYLORS AND THE EDGEWORTHS

For one likes romantically to feel oneself a deliverer
advancing with lights across the waste of years to the
rescue of some stranded ghost — a Mrs. Pilkington, a
Rev. Henry Elman, a Mrs. Ann Gilbert — waiting, ap¬
pealing, forgotten, in the growing gloom. Possibly
they hear one coming. They shuffle, they preen, they
bridle. Old secrets well up to their lips. The divine
relief of communication will soon again be theirs.
The dust shifts and Mrs. Gilbert — but the contact
with life is instantly salutary. Whatever Mrs. Gilbert
may be doing, she is not thinking about us. Far from
it. Colchester, about the year 1800, was for the young
Taylors, as Kensington had been for their mother, “a
very Elysium”. There were the Strutts, the Hills,
the Stapletons; there was poetry, philosophy, engrav¬
ing. For the young Taylors were brought up to work
hard, and if, after a long day’s toil upon their father’s
pictures, they slipped round to dine with the Strutts
they had a right to their pleasure. Already they had
won prizes in Darton and Harvey’s pocketbook. One
of the Strutts knew James Montgomery, and there was
talk, at those gay parties, with the Moorish decora¬
tions and all the cats — for old Ben Strutt was a bit of
a character: did not communicate; would not let his
daughters eat meat, so no wonder they died of con¬
sumption — there was talk of printing a joint volume to

[i54]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

be called The Associate Minstrels , to which James, if
not Robert himself, might contribute. The Stapletons
were poetical, too. Moira and Bithia would wander
over the old town wall at Balkerne Hill reading poetry
by moonlight. Perhaps there was a little too much
poetry in Colchester in 1800. Looking back in the
middle of a prosperous and vigorous life, Ann had to
lament many broken careers, much unfulfilled promise.
The Stapletons died young, perverted, miserable;
Jacob, with his “dark, scorn-speaking countenance”,
who had vowed that he would spend the night looking
for Ann’s lost bracelet in the street, disappeared, “and
I last heard of him vegetating among the ruins of
Rome — himself too much a ruin”; as for the Hills,
their fate was worst of all. To submit to public bap¬
tism was flighty, but to marry Captain M. ! Anybody
could have warned pretty Fanny Hill against Captain
M. Yet off she drove with him in his fine phaeton.
For years nothing more was heard of her. Then one
night, when the Taylors had moved to Ongar and old
Mr. and Mrs. Taylor were sitting over the fire, think¬
ing how, as it was nine o’clock, and the moon was full,
they ought, according to their promise, to look at it
and think of their absent children, there came a knock
at the door. Mrs. Taylor went down to open it. But
who was this sad, shabby-looking woman outside1?
“Oh, don’t you remember the Strutts and the Staple-
tons, and how you warned me against Captain M.?”
cried Fanny Hill, for it was Fanny Hill — poor Fanny
Hill, all worn and sunk; poor Fanny Hill, that used

[i5S]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

to be so sprightly. She was living in a lone house not
far from the Taylors, forced to drudge for her hus¬
band’s mistress, for Captain M. had wasted all her for¬
tune, ruined all her life.

Ann married Mr. G., of course — of course. The
words toll persistently through these obscure volumes.
For in the vast world to which the memoir writers ad¬
mit us there is a solemn sense of something unescap-
able, of a wave gathering beneath the.frail flotilla and
carrying it on. One thinks of Colchester in 1800.
Scribbling verses, reading Montgomery — so they be¬
gin; the Hills, the Stapletons, the Strutts disperse and
disappear as one knew they would ; but here, after long
years, is Ann still scribbling, and at last here is the poet
Montgomery himself in her very house, and she beg¬
ging him to consecrate her child to poetry by just hold¬
ing him in his arms, and he refusing (for he is a bach¬
elor), but taking her for a walk, and they hear the
thunder, and she thinks it the artillery, and he says in
a voice which she will never, never forget : “Yes ! The
artillery of Heaven !” It is one of the attractions of
the unknown, their multitude, their vastness; for, in¬
stead of keeping their identity separate, as remarkable
people do, they seem to merge into one another, their
very boards and title-pages and frontispieces dissolv¬
ing, and their innumerable pages melting into continu¬
ous years so that we can lie back and look up into the
fine mist-like substance of countless lives, and pass un¬
hindered from century to century, from life to life.
Scenes detach themselves. We watch groups. Here

[156]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

is young Mr. Elman talking to Miss Biffen at Brighton.
She has neither arms nor legs; a footman carries her
in and out. She teaches miniature painting to his
sister. Then he is in the stage coach on the road to
Oxford with Newman. Newman says nothing. El¬
man nevertheless reflects that he has known all the
great men of his time. And so back and so forwards,
he paces eternally the fields of Sussex until, grown to
an extreme old age, there he sits in his Rectory think¬
ing of Newman, thinking of Miss Biffen, and making
— it is his great consolation — string bags for mission¬
aries. And then? Go on looking. Nothing much
happens. But the dim light is exquisitely refreshing to
the eyes. Let us watch little Miss Frend trotting along
the Strand with her father. They meet a man with
very bright eyes. “Mr. Blake,” says Mr. Frend. It is
Mrs. Dyer who pours out tea for them in Clifford’s
Inn. Mr. Charles Lamb has just left the room. Mrs.
Dyer says she married George because his washer¬
woman cheated him so. What do you think George
paid for his shirts, she asks? Gently, beautifully, like
the clouds of a balmy evening, obscurity once more
traverses the sky, an obscurity which is not empty but
thick with the star dust of innumerable lives. And
suddenly there is a rift in it, and we see a wretched
little packet-boat pitching off the Irish coast in the
middle of the nineteenth century. There is an unmis¬
takable air of 1840 about the tarpaulins and the hairy
monsters in sou’westers lurching and spitting over the
sloping decks, yet treating the solitary young woman

[157]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

who stands in shawl and poke bonnet gazing, gazing,
not without kindness. No, no, no ! She will not leave
the deck. She will stand there till it is quite dark,
thank you ! “Her great love of the sea . . . drew this
exemplary wife and mother every now and then irre¬
sistibly away from home. No one but her husband
knew where she had gone, and her children learnt only
later in life that on these occasions, when suddenly she
disappeared for a few days, she was/taking short sea
voyages ...” a crime which she expiated by months
of work among the Midland poor. Then the craving
would come upon her, would be confessed in private
to her husband, and off she stole again — the mother
of Sir George Newnes.

One would conclude that human beings were happy,
endowed with such blindness to fate, so indefatigable
an interest in their own activities, were it not for
those sudden and astonishing apparitions staring in at
us, all taut and pale in their determination never to be
forgotten, men who have just missed fame, men who
have passionately desired redress — men like Haydon,
and Mark Pattison, and the Rev. Blanco White. And
in the whole world there is probably but one person
who looks up for a moment and tries to interpret the
menacing face, the furious beckoning fist, before, in
the multitude of human affairs, fragments of faces,
echoes of voices, flying coat-tails, and bonnet strings
disappearing down the shrubbery walks, one’s attention
is distracted for ever. What is that enormous wheel,
for example, careering downhill in Berkshire in the

[158]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

eighteenth century*? It runs faster and faster; sud¬
denly a youth jumps out from within; next moment
it leaps over the edge of a chalk pit and is dashed to
smithereens. This is Edgeworth’s doing — Richard
Lovell Edgeworth, we mean, the portentous bore.

For that is the way he has come down to us in his
two volumes of memoirs — Byron’s bore, Day’s friend,
Maria’s father, the man who almost invented the tele¬
graph, and did, in fact, invent machines for cutting
turnips, climbing walls, contracting on narrow bridges
and lifting their wheels over obstacles — a man meri¬
torious, industrious, advanced, but still, as we in¬
vestigate his memoirs, mainly a bore. Nature endowed
him with irrepressible energy. The blood coursed
through his veins at least twenty times faster than the
normal rate. His face was red, round, vivacious. His
brain raced. His tongue never stopped talking. He
had married four wives and had nineteen children, in¬
cluding the novelist Maria. Moreover, he had known
every one and done everything. His energy burst open
the most secret doors and penetrated to the most pri¬
vate apartments. His wife’s grandmother, for in¬
stance, disappeared mysteriously every day. Edge-
worth blundered in upon her and found her, with her
white locks flowing and her eyes streaming, in prayer
before a crucifix. She was a Roman Catholic then,
but why a penitent*? He found out somehow that
her husband had been killed in a duel, and she had mar¬
ried the man who killed him. “The consolations of
religion are fully equal to its terrors,” Dick Edgeworth

[159]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

reflected as he stumbled out again. Then there was
the beautiful young woman in the castle among the
forests of Dauphiny. Half paralysed, unable to speak
above a whisper, there she lay when Edgeworth broke
in and found her reading. Tapestries flapped on the
castle walls; fifty thousand bats — “odious animals
whose stench is uncommonly noisome” — hung in clus¬
ters in the caves beneath. None of the inhabitants un¬
derstood a word she said. But to the Englishman she
talked for hour after hour about books and politics
and religion. He listened; no doubt he talked. He
sat dumbfounded. But what could one do for her?
Alas, one must leave her lying among the tusks, and
the old men, and the cross-bows, reading, reading, read¬
ing. For Edgeworth was employed in turning the
Rhone from its course. He must get back to his job.
One reflection he would make. “I determined on stead¬
ily persevering in the cultivation of my understand¬
ing.”

He was impervious to the romance of the situations
in which he found himself. Every experience served
only to fortify his character. He reflected, he observed,
he improved himself daily. You can improve, Mr.
Edgeworth used to tell his children, every day of your
life. “He used to say that with this power of im¬
proving they might in time be anything, and without
it in time they would be nothing.” Imperturbable, in¬
defatigable, daily increasing in sturdy self-assurance,
he has the gift of the egoist. He brings out, as he
bustles and bangs on his way, the diffident, shrinking

[160]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

figures who would otherwise be drowned in darkness.
The aged lady, whose private penance he disturbed, is
only one of a series of figures who start up on either
side of his progress, mute, astonished, showing us in a
way that is even now unmistakable, their amazement
at this well-meaning man who bursts in upon them at
their studies and interrupts their prayers. We see him
through their eyes; we see him as he does not dream
of being seen. What a tyrant he was to his first wife !
How intolerably she suffered ! But she never utters a
word. It is Dick Edgeworth who tells her story in
complete ignorance that he is doing anything of the
kind. “It was a singular trait of character in my wife,”
he observes, “who had never shown any uneasiness at
my intimacy with Sir Francis Delaval, that she should
take a strong dislike to Mr. Day. A more dangerous
and seductive companion than the one, or a more moral
and improving companion than the other, could not be
found in England.” It was, indeed, very singular.

For the first Mrs. Edgeworth was a penniless girl,
the daughter of a ruined country gentleman, who sat
over his fire picking cinders from the hearth and throw¬
ing them into the grate, while from time to time he
ejaculated “Hein! Heing!” as yet another scheme for
making his fortune came into his head. She had had no
education. An itinerant writing-master had taught her
to form a few words. When Dick Edgeworth was an
undergraduate and rode over from Oxford she fell in
love with him and married him in order to escape the
poverty and the mystery and the dirt, and to have a

[161]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

husband and children like other women. But with
what result? Gigantic wheels ran downhill with the
bricklayer’s son inside them. Sailing carriages took
flight and almost wrecked four stage coaches. Ma¬
chines did cut turnips, but not very efficiently. Her
little boy was allowed to roam the country like a poor
man’s son, bare-legged, untaught. And Mr. Day,
coming to breakfast and staying to dinner, argued in¬
cessantly about scientific principles and the laws of
nature.

But here we encounter one of the pitfalls of this
nocturnal rambling among forgotten worthies. It is
so difficult to keep, as we must with highly authenti¬
cated people, strictly to the facts. It is so difficult to
refrain from making scenes which, if the past could be
recalled, might perhaps be found lacking in accuracy.
With a character like Thomas Day, in particular,
whose history surpasses the bounds of the credible, we
find ourselves oozing amazement, like a sponge which
has absorbed so much that it can retain no more but
fairly drips. Certain scenes have the fascination which
belongs rather to the abundance of fiction than to the
sobriety of fact. For instance, we conjure up all the
drama of poor Mrs. Edgeworth’s daily life; her be¬
wilderment, her loneliness, her despair, how she must
have wondered whether any one really wanted ma¬
chines to climb walls, and assured the gentlemen that
turnips were better cut simply with a knife, and so
blundered and floundered and been snubbed that she
dreaded the almost daily arrival of the tall young man

[162]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

with his pompous, melancholy face, marked by the
smallpox, his profusion of uncombed black hair, and
his finical cleanliness of hands and person'. He talked
fast, fluently, incessantly, for hours at a time about
philosophy and nature, and M. Rousseau. Yet it was
her house; she had to see to his meals, and, though he
ate as though he were half asleep, his appetite was
enormous. But it was no use complaining to her hus¬
band. Edgeworth said, “She lamented about trifles.”
He went on to say: “The lamenting of a female with
whom we live does not render home delightful.” And
then, with his obtuse open-mindedness, he asked her
what she had to complain of? Did he ever leave her
alone? In the five or six years of their married life
he had slept from home not more than five or six times.
Mr. Day could corroborate that. Mr. Day corrobo¬
rated everything that Mr. Edgeworth said. He egged
him on with his experiments. He told him to leave
his son without education. He did not care a rap what
the people of Henley said. In short, he was at the bot¬
tom of all the absurdities and extravagances which
made Mrs. Edgeworth’s life a burden to her.

Yet let us choose another scene — one of the last that
poor Mrs. Edgeworth was to behold. She was return¬
ing from Lyons, and Mr. Day was her escort. A more
singular figure, as he stood on the deck of the packet
which took them to Dover, very tall, very upright, one
finger in the breast of his coat, letting the wind blow
his hair out, dressed absurdly, though in the height of
fashion, wild, romantic, yet at the same time authorita-

[163]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

tive and pompous, could scarcely be imagined; and
this strange creature, who loathed women, was in
charge of a lady who was about to become a mother,
had adopted two orphan girls, and had set himself to
win the hand of Miss Elizabeth Sneyd by standing be¬
tween boards for six hours daily in order to learn to
dance. Now and again he pointed his toe with rigid
precision; then, waking from the congenial dream into
which the dark clouds, the flying waters, and the
shadow of England upon the horizon had thrown him,
he rapped out an order in the smart, affected tones of a
man of the world. The sailors stared, but they obeyed.
There was something sincere about him, something
proudly indifferent to what you thought; yes, some¬
thing comforting and humane, too, so that Mrs. Edge-
worth for her part was determined never to laugh at
him again. But men were strange; life was difficult,
and with a sigh of bewilderment, perhaps of relief, poor
Mrs. Edgeworth landed at Dover, was brought to bed
of a daughter, and died.

Day meanwhile proceeded to Lichfield. Elizabeth
Sneyd, of course, refused him — gave a great cry,
people said; exclaimed that she had loved Day the
blackguard, but hated Day the gentleman, and rushed
from the room. And then, they said, a terrible thing
happened. Mr. Day, in his rage, bethought him of
the orphan, Sabrina Sydney, whom he had bred to be
his wife; visited her at Sutton Coldfield; flew into a
passion at the sight of her; fired a pistol at her skirts,
poured melted sealing wax over her arms, and boxed

[164]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

her ears. “No; I could never have done that,” Mr.
Edgeworth used to say, when people described the
scene. And whenever to the end of his life he thought
of Thomas Day he fell silent. So great, so passionate,
so inconsistent — his life had been a tragedy, and in
thinking of his friend, the best friend he had ever had,
Richard Edgeworth fell silent.

It is almost the only occasion upon which silence is
recorded of him. To muse, to repent, to contemplate
were foreign to his nature. His wife and friends and
children are silhouetted with extreme vividness upon
a broad disc of interminable chatter. Upon no other
background could we realise so clearly the sharp frag¬
ment of his first wife, or the shades and depths which
make up the character, at once humane and brutal, ad¬
vanced and hidebound of the inconsistent philosopher,
Thomas Day. But his power is not limited to people ;
landscapes, groups, societies seem, even as he describes
them, to split off from him, to be projected away, so
that we are able to run just ahead of him and antici¬
pate his coming. They are brought out all the more
vividly by the extreme incongruity which so often
marks his comment and stamps his presence ; they live
with a peculiar beauty, fantastic, solemn, mysterious,
in contrast with Edgeworth, who is none of these
things. In particular, he brings before us a garden in
Cheshire, the garden of a parsonage, an ancient but
commodious parsonage.

One pushed through a white gate and found oneself
in a grass court, small but well kept, with roses grow-

[165]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

ing in the hedges and grapes hanging from the walls.
But what, in the name of wonder, were those objects in
the middle of the grass plot? Through the dusk of an
autumn evening there shone out an enormous white
globe. Round it at various distances were others of
different sizes — the planets and their satellites, it
seemed. But who could have placed them there, and
why? The house was silent; the windows shut; no¬
body was stirring. Then, furtively peeping from be¬
hind a curtain, appeared for a second the face of an
elderly man, handsome, dishevelled, distraught. It
vanished.

In some mysterious way, human beings inflict
their own vagaries upon nature. Moths and birds
must have flitted more silently through the little gar¬
den ; over everything must have brooded the same fan¬
tastic peace. Then, red-faced, garrulous, inquisitive,
in burst Richard Lovell Edgeworth. He looked at the
globes ; he satisfied himself that they were of “accurate
design and workmanlike construction”. He knocked
at the door. He knocked and knocked. No one came.
At length, as his impatience was overcoming him,
slowly the latch was undone, gradually the door was
opened; a clergyman, neglected, unkempt, but still a
gentleman, stood before him. Edgeworth named him¬
self, and they retired to a parlour littered with books
and papers and valuable furniture now fallen to decay.
At last, unable to control his curiosity any longer,
Edgeworth asked what were the globes in the garden?

[166]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

Instantly the clergyman displayed extreme agitation.
It was his son who had made them, he exclaimed; a
boy of genius, a boy of the greatest industry, and of
virtue and acquirements far beyond his age. But he
had died. His wife had died. Edgeworth tried to turn
the conversation, but in vain. The poor man rushed on
passionately, incoherently about his son, his genius, his
death. “It struck me that his grief had injured his
understanding,” said Edgeworth, and he was becoming
more and more uncomfortable when the door opened
and a girl of fourteen or fifteen, entering with a tea-
tray in her hand, suddenly changed the course of his
host’s conversation. Indeed, she was beautiful ; dressed
in white ; her nose a shade too prominent, perhaps — but
no, her proportions were exquisitely right. “She is a
scholar and an artist !” the clergyman exclaimed as she
left the room. But why did she leave the room? If
she was his daughter why did she not preside at the
tea-table? Was she his mistress? Who was she?
And why was the house in this state of litter and decay?
Why was the front door locked? Why was the clergy¬
man apparently a prisoner, and what was his secret
story? Questions began to crowd into Edgeworth’s
head as he sat drinking his tea; but he could only shake
his head and make one last reflection, “I feared that
something was not right,” as he shut the white wicket
gate behind him, and left alone for ever in the untidy
house among the planets and their satellites, the mad
clergyman and the lovely girl.

[167]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

II

LAETITIA PILKINGTON

Let us bother the librarian once again. Let us ask
him to reach down, dust, and hand over to us that
little brown book over there, the Memoirs of Mrs.
Pilkington, three volumes bound in one, printed by
Peter Hoey in Dublin, MDCCLXXVI. The deepest
obscurity shades her retreat; the dust lies heavy on her
tomb — one board is loose, that is to say, and nobody
has read her since early in the last century when a
reader, presumably a lady, whether disgusted by her
obscenity or stricken by the hand of death, left off in
the middle and marked her place with a faded list of
goods and groceries. If ever a woman wanted a cham¬
pion, it is obviously Laetitia Pilkington. Who then
was she?

Can you imagine a very extraordinary cross be¬
tween Moll Flanders and Lady Ritchie, between a
rolling and rollicking woman of the town and a lady of
breeding and refinement? Laetitia Pilkington (1712-
1759) was something of the sort — shady, shifty, ad¬
venturous, and yet, like Thackeray’s daughter, like
Miss Mitford, like Madame de Sevigne and Jane
Austen and Maria Edgeworth, so imbued with the old
traditions of her sex that she wrote, as ladies talk, to
give pleasure. Throughout her Memoirs, we can never
forget that it is her wish to entertain, her unhappy fate
to sob. Dabbing her eyes and controlling her anguish,

[168]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

she begs us to forgive an odious breach of manners
which only the suffering of a lifetime, the intolerable

persecutions of Mr. P - n, the malignant, she must

say the h - h, spite of Lady C - 1 can excuse. For

who should know better than the Earl of Killmallock’s
great-granddaughter that it is the part of a lady to hide
her sufferings? Thus Laetitia is in the great tradition
of English women of letters. It is her duty to enter¬
tain; it is her instinct to conceal. Still, though her
room near the Royal Exchange is threadbare, and the
table is spread with old play-bills instead of a cloth,
and the butter is served in a shoe, and Mr. Worsdale
has used the teapot to fetch small beer that very morn¬
ing, still she presides, still she entertains. Her lan¬
guage is a trifle coarse, perhaps. But who taught her
English? The great Doctor Swift.

In all her wanderings, which were many and in her
failings, which were great, she looked back to those
early Irish days when Swift had pinched her into pro¬
priety of speech. He had beaten her for fumbling at
a drawer: he had daubed her cheeks with burnt cork
to try her temper; he had bade her pull off her shoes
and stockings and stand against the wainscot and let
him measure her. At first she had refused; then she
had yielded. “Why,” said the Dean, “I suspected you
had either broken Stockings or foul toes, and in either
case should have delighted to expose you.” Three
feet two inches was all she measured, he declared,
though, as Laetitia complained, the weight of Swift’s
hand on her head had made her shrink to half her size.

[169]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

But she was foolish to complain. Probably she owed
her intimacy to that very fact — she was only three
feet two. Swift had lived, a lifetime among the
giants ; now there was a charm in dwarfs. He took the
little creature into his library. “ ‘Well,’ said he, ‘I
have brought you here to show you all the Money I
got when I was in the Ministry, but don’t steal any of
it.’ ‘I won’t, indeed, Sir,’ said I ; so he opened a Cabi¬
net, and showed me a whole parcel of empty drawers.
‘Bless me,’ says he, ‘the Money is flown.’ ” There was
a charm in her surprise; there was a charm in her hu¬
mility, He could beat her and bully her, make her
shout when he was deaf, force her husband to drink the
lees of the wine, pay their cab fares, stuff guineas into
a piece of gingerbread, and relent surprisingly, as if
there were something grimly pleasing to him in the
thought of so foolish a midget setting up to have a
life and a mind of her own. For with Swift she was
herself ; it was the effect of his genius. She had to pull
off her stockings if he told her to. So, though his satire
terrified her, and she found it highly unpleasant to
dine at the Deanery and see him watching, in the great
glass which hung before him for that purpose, the but¬
ler stealing beer at the sideboard, she knew that it was
a privilege to walk with him in his garden; to hear
him talk of Mr. Pope and quote Hudibras; and then
be hustled back in the rain to save coach hire, and then
to sit chatting in the parlour with Mrs. Brent, the
housekeeper, about the Dean’s oddity and charity, and

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how the sixpence he saved on the coach he gave to the
lame old man who sold gingerbread at the corner,
while the Dean dashed up the front stairs and down
the back so violently that she was afraid he would fall
and hurt himself.

But memories of great men are no infallible specific.
They fall upon the race of life like beams from a light¬
house. They flash, they shock, they reveal, they van¬
ish. To remember Swift was of little avail to Laetitia
when the troubles of life came thick about her. Mr.
Pilkington left her for Widow W — rr — n. Her fa¬
ther — her dear father — died. The sheriff’s officers in¬
sulted her. She was deserted in an empty house with
two children to provide for. The tea chest was secured,
the garden gate locked, and the bills left unpaid. And
still she was young and attractive and gay, with an
inordinate passion for scribbling verses and an incredi¬
ble hunger for reading books. It was this that was her
undoing. The book was fascinating and the hour late.
The gentleman would not lend it, but would stay till
she had finished. They sat in her bedroom. It was
highly indiscreet, she owned. Suddenly twelve watch¬
men broke through the kitchen window, and Mr. Pil¬
kington appeared with a cambric handkerchief tied
about his neck. Swords were drawn and heads broken.
As for her excuse, how could one expect Mr. Pilkington
and the twelve watchmen to believe that? Only read¬
ing ! Only sitting up late to finish a new book ! Mr.
Pilkington and the watchmen interpreted the situation

[l7l]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

as such men would. But lovers of learning, she is per¬
suaded, will understand her passion and deplore its
consequences.

And now what was she to do? Reading had played
her false, but still she could write. Ever since she
could form her letters, indeed, she had written, writh
incredible speed and considerable grace, odes, ad¬
dresses, apostrophes to Miss Hoadley, to the Recorder
of Dublin, to Dr. Delville’s place in the country.
“Hail, happy Delville, blissful seat!” “Is there a

man whose fixed and steady gaze - ” — the verses

flowed without the slightest difficulty on the slightest
occasion. Now, therefore, crossing to England, she
set up, as her advertisement had it, to write letters upon
any subject, except the law, for twelve pence ready
money, and no trust given. She lodged opposite
White’s Chocolate House, and there, in the evening, as
she watered her flowers on the leads, the noble gentle¬
men in the window across the road drank her health,
sent her over a bottle of burgundy; and later she heard

old Colonel - crying, “Poke after me, my lord, poke

after me,” as he shepherded the D - of M — lb — gh

up her dark stairs. That lovely gentleman, who hon¬
oured his title by wearing it, kissed her, complimented
her, opened his pocket-book, and left her with a bank¬
note for fifty pounds upon Sir Francis Child. Such
tributes stimulated her pen to astonishing outbursts of
impromptu gratitude. If, on the other hand, a gentle¬
man refused to buy or a lady hinted impropriety, this
same flowery pen writhed and twisted in agonies of

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THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

hate and vituperation. “Had I said that your F - r

died Blaspheming the Almighty”, one of her accusa¬
tions begins, but the end is unprintable. Great ladies
were accused of every depravity, and the clergy, un¬
less their taste in poetry was above reproach, suffered
an incessant castigation. Mr. Pilkington, she never
forgot, was a clergyman.

Slowly but surely the Earl of Killmallock’s great-
granddaughter descended in the social scale. From St.
James’s Street and its noble benefactors she migrated
to Green Street to lodge with Lord Stair’s valet de
chambre and his wife, who washed for persons of dis¬
tinction. She, who had dallied with dukes, was glad
for company’s sake to take a hand at quadrille with
footmen and laundresses and Grub Street writers, who,
as they drank porter, sipped green tea, and smoked to¬
bacco, told stories of the utmost scurrility about their
masters and mistresses. The spiciness of their conver¬
sation made amends for the vulgarity of their man¬
ners. From them Laetitia picked up those anecdotes
of the great which sprinkled her pages with dashes and
served her purpose when subscribers failed and land¬
ladies grew insolent. Indeed, it was a hard life — to
trudge to Chelsea in the snow wearing nothing but a
chintz gown and be put off with a beggarly half-crown
by Sir Hans Sloane; next to tramp to Ormond Street
and extract two guineas from the odious Dr. Meade,
which, in her glee, she tossed in the air and lost in a
crack of the floor; to be insulted by footmen; to sit
down to a dish of boiling water because her land-

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THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

lady must not guess that a pinch of tea was beyond her
means. Twice on moonlight nights, with the lime trees
in flower, she wandered in St. James’s Park and con¬
templated suicide in Rosamond’s Pond. Once, musing
among the tombs in Westminster Abbey, the door was
locked on her, and she had to spend the night in the
pulpit wrapped in a carpet from the Communion Ta¬
ble to protect herself from the assaults of rats. “I
long to listen to the young-ey’d cherubims!” she ex¬
claimed. But a very different fate was in store for
her. In spite of Mr. Colley Cibber, and Mr. Richard¬
son, who supplied her first with gilt-edged notepaper
and then with baby linen, those harpies, her landladies,
after drinking her ale, devouring her lobsters, and fail¬
ing often for years at a time to comb their hair, suc¬
ceeded in driving Swift’s friend, and the Earl’s great-
granddaughter, to be imprisoned with common debtors
in the Marshalsea.

Bitterly she cursed her husband who had made her
a lady of adventure instead of what nature intended,
“a harmless household dove”. More and more wildly
she ransacked her brains for anecdotes, memories, scan¬
dals, views about the bottomless nature of the sea, the
inflammable character of the earth — anything that
would fill a page and earn her a guinea. She remem¬
bered that she had eaten plovers’ eggs with Swift.
“Here, Hussey,” said he, “is a Plover’s egg. King
William used to give crowns apiece for them. . . .”
Swift never laughed, she remembered. He used to suck
in his cheeks instead of laughing. And what else could

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THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

she remember ? A great many gentlemen, a great many
landladies; how the window was thrown up when her
father died, and her sister came downstairs with the
sugar-basin, laughing. All had been bitterness and
struggle, except that she had loved Shakespeare, known
Swift, and kept through all the shifts and shades of an
adventurous career a gay spirit, something of a lady’s
breeding, and the gallantry which, at the end of her
short life, led her to crack her joke and enjoy her duck
with death at her heart and duns at her pillow.

Ill

MISS ORMEROD1

The trees stood massively in all their summer foliage
spotted and grouped upon a meadow which sloped
gently down from the big white house. There were
unmistakable signs of the year 1835 both in the trees
and in the sky, for modern trees are not nearly so volu¬
minous as these ones, and the sky of those days had
a kind of pale diffusion in its texture which was differ¬
ent from the more concentrated tone of the skies we
know.

Mr. George Ormerod stepped from the drawing¬
room window of Sedbury House, Gloucestershire, wear¬
ing a tall furry hat and white trousers strapped under
his instep; he was closely, though deferentially, fol-

1 Founded upon the Life of Eleanor Ormerod, by Robert Wallace
Murray. 1904.

[I75l

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

lowed by a lady wearing a yellow-spotted dress over
a crinoline, and behind her, singly and arm in arm,
came nine children in nankeen jackets and long white
drawers. They were going to see the water let out of a
pond.

The youngest child, Eleanor, a little girl with a pale
face, rather elongated features, and black hair, was left
by herself in the drawing-room, a large sallow apart¬
ment with pillars, two chandeliers, for some reason
enclosed in holland bags, and several octagonal tables
some of inlaid wood and others of greenish malachite.
At one of these little Eleanor Ormerod was seated in a
high chair.

“Now, Eleanor,” said her mother, as the party as¬
sembled for the expedition to the pond, “here are some
pretty beetles. Don’t touch the glass. Don’t get down
from your chair, and when we come back little George
will tell you all about it.”

So saying, Mrs. Ormerod placed a tumbler of water
containing about half a dozen great water grubs in the
middle of the malachite table, at a safe distance from
the child, and followed her husband down the slope of
old-fashioned turf towards a cluster of extremely old-
fashioned sheep; opening, directly she stepped on to
the terrace, a tiny parasol of bottle green silk with a
bottle green fringe, though the sky was like nothing so
much as a flock bed covered with a counterpane of
white dimity.

The plump pale grubs gyrated slowly round and
round in the tumbler. So simple an entertainment

[176]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

must surely soon have ceased to satisfy. Surely Elea¬
nor would shake the tumbler, upset the grubs, and
scramble down from her chair. Why, even a grown
person can hardly watch those grubs crawling down the
glass wall, then floating to the surface, without a sense
of boredom not untinged with disgust. But the child
sat perfectly still. Was it her custom, then, to be en¬
tertained by the gyrations of grubs? Her eyes were re¬
flective, even critical. But they shone with increasing
excitement. She beat one hand upon the edge of the
table. What was the reason? One of the grubs had
ceased to float : he lay at the bottom ; the rest, descend¬
ing, proceeded to tear him to pieces.

“And how has little Eleanor enjoyed herself?” asked
Mr. Ormerod, in rather a deep voice, stepping into the
room and with a slight air of heat and of fatigue upon
his face.

“Papa,” said Eleanor, almost interrupting her father
in her eagerness to impart her observation, “I saw one
of the grubs fall down and the rest came and ate him !”

“Nonsense, Eleanor,” said Mr. Ormerod. “You are
not telling the truth.” He looked severely at the tum¬
bler in which the beetles were still gyrating as before.

“Papa, it was true !”

“Eleanor, little girls are not allowed to contradict
their fathers,” said Mrs. Ormerod, coming in through
the window, and closing her green parasol with a snap.

“Let this be a lesson,” Mr. Ormerod began, signing
to the other children to approach, when the door
opened, and the servant announced,

[177]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

“Captain Fenton.”

Captain Fenton “was at times thought to be tedious
in his recurrence to the charge of the Scots Greys in
which he had served at the battle of Waterloo.”

But what is this crowd gathered round the door of
the George Hotel in Chepstow? A faint cheer rises
from the bottom of the hill. Up comes the mail coach,
horses steaming, panels mud-splashed. “Make way !
Make way!” cries the ostler and the vehicle dashes into
the courtyard, pulls up sharp before the door. Down
jumps the coachman, the horses are led off, and a fine
team of spanking greys is harnessed with incredible
speed in their stead. Upon all this — coachman, horses,
coach, and passengers — the crowd looked with gaping
admiration every Wednesday evening all through the
year. But to-day, the twelfth of March, 1852, as the
coachman settled his rug, and stretched his hands for
the reins, he observed that instead of being fixed upon
him, the eyes of the people of Chepstow darted this
way and that. Heads were jerked. Arms flung out.
Here a hat swooped in a semi-circle. Off drove the
coach almost unnoticed. As it turned the corner all
the outside passengers craned their necks, and one gen¬
tleman rose to his feet and shouted, “There! there!
there!” before he was bowled into eternity. It was an
insect — a red-winged insect. Out the people of Chep¬
stow poured into the high road ; down the hill they ran ;
always the insect flew in front of them; at length by
Chepstow Bridge a young man, throwing his bandanna

[178]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

over the blade of an oar, captured it alive and pre¬
sented it to a highly respectable elderly gentleman who
now came puffing upon the scene — Samuel Budge, doc¬
tor, of Chepstow. By Samuel Budge it was presented
to Miss Ormerod ; by her sent to a professor at Oxford.
And he, declaring it “a fine specimen of the rose under¬
winged locust” added the gratifying information that
it “was the first of the kind to be captured so far west.”

And so, at the age of twenty-four Miss Eleanor
Ormerod was thought the proper person to receive the
gift of a locust.

When Eleanor Ormerod appeared at archery meet¬
ings and croquet tournaments young men pulled their
whiskers and young ladies looked grave. It was so
difficult to make friends with a girl who could talk of
nothing but black beetles and earwigs — “Yes, that’s
what she likes, isn’t it queer*? — Why, the other day
Ellen, Mama’s maid, heard from Jane, who’s under-
kitchenmaid at Sedbury House, that Eleanor tried to
boil a beetle in the kitchen saucepan and he wouldn’t
die, and swam round and round, and she got into a ter¬
rible state and sent the groom all the way to Gloucester
to fetch chloroform — all for an insect, my dear ! — and
she gives the cottagers shillings to collect beetles for
her — and she spends hours in her bedroom cutting them
up — and she climbs trees like a boy to find wasps’ nests
—oh, you can’t think what they don’t say about her in
the village — for she does look so odd, dressed anyhow,
with that great big nose and those bright little eyes,

[i79]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

so like a caterpillar herself, I always think — but of
course she’s wonderfully clever and very good, too,
both of them. Georgiana has a lending library for the
cottagers, and Eleanor never misses a service — but
there she is — that short pale girl in the large bonnet.
Do go and talk to her, for I’m sure I’m too stupid, but
you’d find plenty to say — ” But neither Fred nor Ar¬
thur, Henry nor William found anything to say —

“. . . probably the lecturer would have been equally well
pleased had none of her own sex put in an appearance.”

This comment upon a lecture delivered in the year 1889
throws some light, perhaps, upon archery meetings in the
’fifties.

It being nine o’clock on a February night some time
about 1862 all the Ormerods were in the library; Mr.
Ormerod making architectural designs at a table ; Mrs.
Ormerod lying on a sofa making pencil drawings upon
grey paper; Eleanor making a model of a snake to
serve as a paper weight; Georgiana making a copy of
the font in Tidenham Church; some of the others ex¬
amining books with beautiful illustrations; while at
intervals someone rose, unlocked the wire book case,
took down a volume for instruction or entertainment,
and perused it beneath the chandelier.

Mr. Ormerod required complete silence for his stud¬
ies. His word was law, even to the dogs, who, in the
absence of their master, instinctively obeyed the eldest
male person in the room. Some whispered colloquy
there might be between Mrs. Ormerod and her daugh¬
ters —

[180]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

“The draught under the pew was really worse than
ever this morning, Mama — ”

“And we could only unfasten the latch in the chan¬
cel because Eleanor happened to have her ruler with
her—”

“ — hm — m — m. Dr. Armstrong — Hm — m — m — ”

“ — Anyhow things aren’t as bad with us as they are
at Kinghampton. They say Mrs. Briscoe’s Newfound¬
land dog follows her right up to the chancel rails when
she takes the sacrament — ”

“And the turkey is still sitting on its eggs in the pul¬
pit.”

— “The period of incubation for a turkey is between
three and four weeks” — said Eleanor, thoughtfully
looking up from her cast of the snake and forgetting,
in the interest of her subject, to speak in a whisper.

“Am I to be allowed no peace in my own house?”
Mr. Ormerod exclaimed angrily, rapping with his ruler
on the table, upon which Mrs. Ormerod half shut one
eye and squeezed a little blob of Chinese white on to her
high light, and they remained silent until the servants
came in, when everyone, with the exception of Mrs.
Ormerod, fell on their knees. For she, poor lady, suf¬
fered from a chronic complaint and left the family
party forever a year or two later, when the green sofa
was moved into the corner, and the drawings given to
her nieces in memory of her. But Mr. Ormerod went
on making architectural drawings at nine p.m. every
night (save on Sundays when he read a sermon) until
he too lay upon the green sofa, which had not been

[181]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

used since Mrs. Ormerod lay there, but still looked
much the same. “We deeply felt the happiness of
ministering to his welfare,” Miss Ormerod wrote, “for
he would not hear of our leaving him for even twenty-
four hours and he objected to visits from my brothers
excepting occasionally for a short time. They, not be¬
ing used to the gentle ways necessary for an aged in¬
valid, worried him . . . the Thursday following, the
9th October, 1873, he passed gently away at the mature
age of eighty-seven years.” Oh, graves in country
churchyards — respectable burials— mature old gentle¬
men — D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S., F.S.A.— lots of letters
come after your names, but lots of women are buried
with you !

There remained the Hessian Fly and the Bot — mys¬
terious insects ! Not, one would have thought, among
God’s most triumphant creations, and yet — if you see
them under a microscope! — the Bot, obese, globular,
obscene ; the Hessian, booted, spurred, whiskered,
cadaverous. Next slip under the glass an innocent
grain; behold it pock-marked and livid; or take this
strip of hide, and note those odious pullulating lumps
— well, what does the landscape look like then?

The only palatable object for the eye to rest on in
acres of England is a lump of Paris Green. But Eng¬
lish people won’t use microscopes ; you can’t make them
use Paris Green either — or if they do, they let it drip.
Dr. Ritzema Bos is a great stand-by. For they won’t
take a woman’s word. And indeed, though for the sake

[182]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

of the Ox Warble one must stretch a point, there are
matters, questions of stock infestation, things one has
to go into — things a lady doesn’t even like to see,
much less discuss, in print — “these, I say, I intend to
leave entirely to the Veterinary surgeons. My brother
— oh, he’s dead now — a very good man — for whom
I collected wasps’ nests — lived at Brighton and wrote
about wasps — he, I say, wouldn’t let me learn anatomy,
never liked me to do more than take sections of teeth.”

Ah, but Eleanor, the Bot and the Hessian have more
power over you than Mr. Edward Ormerod himself.
Under the microscope you clearly perceive that these
insects have organs, orifices, excrement; they do, most
emphatically, copulate. Escorted on the one side by
the Bos or Warble, on the other by the Hessian Ely,
Miss Ormerod advanced statelily, if slowly, into the
open. Never did her features show more sublime than
when lit up by the candour of her avowal. “This is
excrement; these, though Ritzema Bos is positive to the
contrary, are the generative organs of the male. I’ve
proved it.” Upon her head the hood of Edinburgh
most fitly descended ; pioneer of purity even more than
of Paris Green.

“If you’re sure I’m not in your way,” said Miss Lips¬
comb unstrapping her paint box and planting her tri¬
pod firmly in the path, “ — I’ll try to get a picture of
those lovely hydrangeas against the sky — What flow¬
ers you have in Penzance!”

The market gardener crossed his hands on his hoe,

[183]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

slowly twined a piece of bass round his finger, looked
at the sky, said something about the sun, also about
the prevalence of lady artists, and then, with a nod of
his head, observed sententiously that it was to a lady
that he owed everything he had.

“Ah?” said Miss Lipscomb, flattered, but already
much occupied with her composition.

“A lady with a queer-sounding name,” said Mr. Pas-
coe, “but that’s the lady I’ve called my little girl after
— I don’t think there’s such another in Christendom.”

Of course it was Miss Ormerod, equally of course
Miss Lipscomb was the sister of Miss Ormerod’s fam¬
ily doctor; and so she did no sketching that morning,
but left with a handsome bunch of grapes instead — for
every flower had drooped, ruin had stared him in the
0\e — he had written, not believing one bit what they
told him — to the lady with the queer name, back there
came a book “In-ju-ri-ous In-sects,” with the page
turned down, perhaps by her very hand, also a letter
which he kept at home under the clock, but he knew
every word by heart, since it was due to what she said
there that he wasn’t a ruined man — and the tears ran
down his face and Miss Lipscomb, clearing a space on
the lodging-house table, wrote the whole story to her
brother.

“The prejudice against Paris Green certainly seems
to be dying down,” said Miss Ormerod when she read
it. — “But now,” she sighed rather heavily, being no
longer young and much afflicted with the gout, “now
it’s the sparrows.”

[184]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

One might have thought that they would have left
her alone — innocent dirt-grey birds, taking more than
their share of the breakfast crumbs, otherwise inoffen¬
sive. But once you look through a microscope — once
you see the Hessian and the Bot as they really are —
there’s no peace for an elderly lady pacing her terrace
on a fine May morning. For example, why, when
there are crumbs enough for all, do only the sparrows
get them? Why not swallows or martins? Why —
oh, here come the servants for prayers —

“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that
trespass against us. . . . For thine is the Kingdom and
the power and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen — ”
“The Times, ma’am — ”

“Thank you, Dixon. . . . The Queen’s birthdav!
We must drink her Majesty’s health in the old white
port, Dixon. Home Rule — tut — tut — tut. All that
madman Gladstone. My father would have thought
the world was coming to an end, and I’m not at all
sure that it isn’t. I must talk to Dr. Lipscomb — ”
Yet all the time in the tail of her eye she saw my¬
riads of sparrows, and retiring to the study proclaimed
in a pamphlet of which 36,000 copies were gratui¬
tously distributed that the sparrow is a pest.

“When he eats an insect,” she said to her sister
Georgiana, “which isn’t often, it’s one of the few in¬
sects that one wants to keep — one of the very few,”
she added with a touch of acidity natural to one whose
investigations have all tended to the discredit of the
insect race.

[185]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

“But there’ll be some very unpleasant consequences
to face,” she concluded — “Very unpleasant indeed.”

Happily the port was now brought in, the servants
assembled; and Miss Ormerod, rising to her feet, gave
the toast “Her Blessed Majesty.” She was extremely
loyal, and moreover she liked nothing better than a
glass of her father’s old white port. She kept his pig¬
tail, too, in a box.

Such being her disposition it went hard with her to
analyse the sparrow’s crop, for the sparrow she felt,
symbolises something of the homely virtue of English
domestic life, and to proclaim it stuffed with deceit
was disloyal to much that she, and her fathers before
her, held dear. Sure enough the clergy — the Rev. J.
E. Walker — denounced her for her brutality; “God
Save the Sparrow!” exclaimed the Animal’s Friend;
and Miss Carrington, of the Humanitarian League,
replied in a leaflet described by Miss Ormerod as “spir-
ity, discourteous, and inaccurate.”

“Well,” said Miss Ormerod to her sister, “it did me
no harm before to be threatened to be shot at, also
hanged in effigy, and other little attentions.”

“Still it was very disagreeable, Eleanor — more dis¬
agreeable I believe, to me than to you,” said Georgiana.
Soon Georgiana died. She had however finished the
beautiful series of insect diagrams at which she worked
every morning in the dining-room and they were pre¬
sented to Edinburgh University. But Eleanor was
never the same woman after that.

Dear forest fly — flour moths — weevils — grouse and

[186]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

cheese flies — beetles — foreign correspondents — eel
worms — ladybirds — wheat midges — resignation from
the Royal Agricultural Society — gall mites — boot
beetles — Announcement of honorary degree to be con¬
ferred — feelings of appreciation and anxiety — paper
on wasps — last annual report warnings of serious ill¬
ness — proposed pension — gradual loss of strength —
Finally Death.

That is life, so they say.

“It does no good to keep people waiting for an
answer,” sighed Miss Ormerod, “though I don’t feel as
able as I did since that unlucky accident at Waterloo.
And no one realises what the strain of the work is —
often I’m the only lady in the room, and the gentlemen
so learned, though I’ve always found them most help¬
ful, most generous in every way. But I’m growing old,
Miss Hartwell, that’s what it is. That’s what led me
to be thinking of this difficult matter of flour infesta¬
tion in the middle of the road so that I didn’t see the
horse until he had poked his nose into my ear. . . .
Then there’s this nonsense about a pension. What
could possess Mr. Barron to think of such a thing? I
should feel inexpressibly lowered if I accepted a pen¬
sion. Why, I don’t altogether like writing LL.D.
after my name, though Georgie would have liked it.
All I ask is to be let go on in my own quiet way. Now
where is Messrs. Langridge’s sample? We must take
that first. ‘Gentlemen, I have examined your sample
and find . .

[187]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

“If any one deserves a thorough good rest it’s you,
Miss Ormerod,” said Dr. Lipscomb, who had grown
a little white over the ears. “I should say the farm¬
ers of England ought to set up a statue to you, bring
offerings of corn and wine — make you a kind of God¬
dess, eh — what was her name?”

“Not a very shapely figure for a Goddess,” said Miss
Ormerod with a little laugh. “I should enjoy the wine
though. You’re not going to cut me off my one glass
of port surely?”

“You must remember,” said Dr. Lipscomb, shaking
his head, “how much your life means to others.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Miss Ormerod,
pondering a little. “To be sure, I’ve chosen my
epitaph. ‘She introduced Paris Green into England,’
and there might be a word or two about the Hessian
fly — that, I do believe, was a good piece of work.”

“No need to think about epitaphs yet,” said Dr.
Lipscomb.

“Our lives are in the hands of the Lord,” said Miss
Ormerod simply.

Dr. Lipscomb bent his head and looked out of the
window. Miss Ormerod remained silent.

“English entomologists care little or nothing for ob¬
jects of practical importance,” she exclaimed suddenly.
“Take this question of flour infestation — I can’t say
how many grey hairs that hasn’t grown me.”

“Figuratively speaking, Miss Ormerod,” said Dr.
Lipscomb, for her hair was still raven black.

“Well, I do believe all good work is done in con-

[188]

THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE

cert,” Miss Ormerod continued. “It is often a great
comfort to me to think that.”

“It’s beginning to rain,” said Dr. Lipscomb. “How
will your enemies like that, Miss Ormerod?”

“Hot or cold, wet or dry, insects always flourish!”
cried Miss Ormerod, energetically sitting up in bed.

“Old Miss Ormerod is dead,” said Mr. Drummond,
opening The Times on Saturday, July 20th, 1901.

“Old Miss Ormerod?” asked Mrs. Drummond.

[189]

Jane Austen

It is probable that if Miss Cassandra Austen had had
her way, we should have had nothing of Jane Austen’s
except her novels. To her elder sister alone did she
write freely; to her alone she confided her hopes and,
if rumour is true, the one great disappointment of her
life; but when Miss Cassandra Austen grew old, and
the growth of her sister’s fame made her suspect that
a time might come when strangers would pry and
scholars speculate, she burnt, at great cost to herself,
every letter that could gratify their curiosity, and
spared only what she judged too trivial to be of in¬
terest.

Hence our knowledge of Jane Austen is derived from
a little gossip, a few letters, and her books. As for the
gossip, gossip which has survived its day is never des¬
picable; with a little rearrangement it suits our pur¬
pose admirably. For example, Jane “is not at all
pretty and very prim, unlike a girl of twelve . . .
Jane is whimsical and affected,” says little Philadel¬
phia Austen of her cousin. Then we have Mrs. Mit-
ford, who knew the Austens as girls and thought Jane
“the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting
butterfly she ever remembers”. Next, there is Miss
Mitford’s anonymous friend “who visits her now
[and] says that she has stiffened into the most per¬
pendicular, precise, taciturn piece of ‘single blessed-

[191]

JANE AUSTEN

ness’ that ever existed, and that, until Pride and
Prejudice showed what a precious gem was hidden in
that unbending case, she was no more regarded in
society than a poker or firescreen. . . . The case is
very different now,” the good lady goes on; “she is
still a poker — but a poker of whom everybody is afraid.
. . . A wit, a delineator of character, who does not
talk is terrific indeed !” On the other side, of course,
there are the Austens, a race little given to panegyric
of themselves, but nevertheless, they say, her brothers
“were very fond and very proud of her. They were
attached to her by her talents, her virtues, and her
engaging manners, and each loved afterwards to fancy
a resemblance in some niece or daughter of his own
to the dear sister Jane, whose perfect equal they yet
never expected to see.” Charming but perpendicular,
loved at home but feared by strangers, biting of tongue
but tender of heart — these contrasts are by no means
incompatible, and when we turn to the novels we shall
find ourselves stumbling there too over the same com¬
plexities in the writer.

To begin with, that prim little girl whom Philadel¬
phia found so unlike a child of twelve, whimsical and
affected, was soon to be the authoress of an astonishing
and unchildish story, Love and Fremdshipj which,
incredible though it appears, was written at the age
of fifteen. It was written, apparently, to amuse the
schoolroom; one of the stories in the same book is
dedicated with mock solemnity to her brother; another
1 Love and Freindship, Chatto and Windus,

[192]

JANE AUSTEN

is neatly illustrated with water-colour heads by her
sister. There are jokes which, one feels, were family
property; thrusts of satire, which went home because
all little Austens made mock in common of fine ladies
who “sighed and fainted on the sofa”.

Brothers and sisters must have laughed when Jane
read out loud her last hit at the vices which they all
abhorred. “I die a martyr to my grief for the loss of
Augustius. One fatal swoon has cost me my life.
Beware of Swoons, Dear Laura. . . . Run mad as
often as you chuse, but do not faint. . . .” And on
she rushed, as fast as she could write and quicker than
she could spell, to tell the incredible adventures of
Laura and Sophia, of Philander and Gustavus, of the
gentleman who drove a coach between Edinburgh and
Stirling every other day, of the theft of the fortune
that was kept in the table drawer, of the starving
mothers and the sons who acted Macbeth. Undoubt¬
edly, the story must have roused the schoolroom to up¬
roarious laughter. And yet, nothing is more obvious
than that this girl of fifteen, sitting in her private
corner of the common parlour, was writing not to draw
a laugh from brother and sisters, and not for home
consumption. She was writing for everybody, for
nobody, for our age, for her own; in other words,
even at that early age Jane Austen was writing. One
hears it in the rhythm and shapeliness and severity of
the sentences. “She was nothing more than a mere
good tempered, civil, and obliging young woman; as
such we could scarcely dislike her — she was only an

[193]

JANE AUSTEN

object of contempt.” Such a sentence is meant to out¬
last the Christmas holidays. Spirited, easy, full of
fun, verging with freedom upon sheer nonsense, — -
Love and Freindship is all that, but what is this note
which never merges in the rest, which sounds distinctly
and penetratingly all through the volume*? It is the
sound of laughter. The girl of fifteen is laughing, in
her corner, at the world.

Girls of fifteen are always laughing. They laugh
when Mr. Binney helps himself to salt instead of
sugar. They almost die of laughing when old Mrs.
Tomkins sits down upon the cat. But they are crying
the moment after. They have no fixed abode from
which they see that there is something eternally laugh¬
able in human nature, some quality in men and women
that for ever excites our satire. They do not know
that Lady Greville who snubs, and poor Maria who
is snubbed, are permanent features of every ballroom.
But Jane Austen knew it from her birth upwards.
One of those fairies who perch upon cradles must
have taken her a flight through the world directly she
was born. When she was laid in the cradle again
she knew not only what the world looked like, but had
already chosen her kingdom. She had agreed that if
she might rule over that territory, she would covet no
other. Thus at fifteen she had few illusions about
other people and none about herself. Whatever she
writes is finished and turned and set in its relation,
not to the parsonage, but to the universe. She is im¬
personal; she is inscrutable. When the writer, Jane

[194]

JAN E AUSTEN

Austen, wrote down in the most remarkable sketch in
the book a little of Lady Greville’s conversation, there
is no trace of anger at the snub which the clergyman’s
daughter, Jane Austen, once received. Her gaze passes
straight to the mark, and we know precisely where,
upon the map of human nature, that mark is. We
know because Jane Austen kept to her compact; she
never trespassed beyond her boundaries. Never, even
at the emotional age of fifteen, did she round upon
herself in shame, obliterate a sarcasm in a spasm of
compassion, or blur an outline in a mist of rhapsody.
Spasms and rhapsodies, she seems to have said, point¬
ing with her stick, end there; and the boundary line is
perfectly distinct. But she does not deny that moons
and mountains and castles exist — on the other side.
She has even one romance of her own. It is for the
Queen of Scots. She really admired her very much.
“One of the first characters in the world,” she called
her, “a bewitching Princess whose only friend was then
the Duke of Norfolk, and whose only ones now Mr.
Whitaker, Mrs. Lefroy, Mrs. Knight and myself.”
With these words her passion is neatly circumscribed,
and rounded with a laugh. It is amusing to remember
in what terms the young Brontes wrote, not very much
later, in their northern parsonage, about the Duke of
Wellington.

The prim little girl grew up. She became “the pret¬
tiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly”
Mrs. Mitford ever remembered, and, incidentally, the
authoress of a novel called Pride and Prejudice , which,

[195]

JANE AUSTEN

written stealthily under cover of a creaking door, lay
for many years unpublished. A little later, it is
thought, she began another story, The Watsons , and
being for some reason dissatisfied with it, left it un¬
finished. Unfinished and unsuccessful, it may throw
more light upon its writer’s genius than the polished
masterpiece blazing in universal fame. Her difficulties
are more apparent in it, and the method she took to
overcome them less artfully concealed. To begin with,
the stiffness and the bareness of the first chapters prove
that she was one of those writers who lay their facts out
rather baldly in the first version and then go back and
back and back and cover them with flesh and atmos¬
phere. How it would have been done we cannot say —
by what suppressions and insertions and artful devices.
But the miracle would have been accomplished ; the dull
history of fourteen years of family life would have been
converted into another of those exquisite and appar¬
ently effortless introductions; and we should never
have guessed what pages of preliminary drudgery Jane
Austen forced her pen to go through. Here we per¬
ceive that she was no conjuror after all. Like other
writers, she had to create the atmosphere in which her
own peculiar genius could bear fruit. Here she fum¬
bles; here she keeps us waiting. Suddenly, she has
done it; now things can happen as she likes things to
happen. The Edwards’ are going to the ball. The
Tomlinsons’ carriage is passing; she can tell us that
Charles is “being provided with his gloves and told to
keep them on”; Tom Musgrove retreats to a remote

[196]

JANE AUSTEN

corner with a barrel of oysters and is famously snug.
Her genius is freed and active. At once our senses
quicken; we are possessed with the peculiar intensity
which she alone can impart. But of what is it all com¬
posed? Of a ball in a country town; a few couples
meeting and taking hands in an assembly room; a
little eating and drinking; and for catastrophe, a boy
being snubbed by one young lady and kindly treated
by another. There is no tragedy and no heroism. Yet
for some reason the little scene is moving out of all
proportion to its surface solemnity. We have been
made to see that if Emma acted so in the ball-room,
how considerate, how tender, inspired by what sincerity
of feeling she would have shown herself in those graver
crises of life which, as we watch her, come inevitably
before our eyes. Jane Austen is thus a mistress of
much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface.
She stimulates us to supply what is not there. What
she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet is composed of
something that expands in the reader’s mind and
endows with the most enduring form of life scenes
which are outwardly trivial. Always the stress is laid
upon character. How, we are made to wonder, will
Emma behave when Lord Osborne and Tom Musgrove
make their call at five minutes before three, just as
Mary is bringing in the tray and the knife-case? It
is an extremely awkward situation. The young men
are accustomed to much greater refinement. Emma
may prove herself ill-bred, vulgar, a nonentity. The
turns and twists of the dialogue keep us on the tenter-

[197]

JANE AUSTEN

hooks of suspense. Our attention is half upon the pres¬
ent moment, half upon the future. And when, in the
end, Emma behaves in such a way as to vindicate our
highest hopes of her, we are moved as if we had been
made witnesses of a matter of the highest importance.
Here, indeed, in this unfinished and in the main in¬
ferior story are all the elements of Jane Austen’s great¬
ness. It has the permanent quality of literature.
Think away the surface animation, the likeness to life,
and there remains to provide a deeper pleasure, an ex¬
quisite discrimination of human values. Dismiss this
too from the mind and one can dwell with extreme
satisfaction upon the more abstract art which, in the
ball-room scene, so varies the emotions and proportions
the parts that it is possible to enjoy it, as one enjoys
poetry, for itself, and not as a link which carries the
story this way and that.

But the gossip says of Jane Austen that she was
perpendicular, precise, and taciturn — “a poker of
whom everybody is afraid”. Of this too there are
traces ; she could be merciless enough ; she is one of the
most consistent satirists in the whole of literature.
Those first angular chapters of The Watsons prove that
hers was not a prolific genius ; she had not, like Emily
Bronte, merely to open the door to make herself felt.
Humbly and gaily she collected the twigs and straws
out of which the nest was to be made and placed them
neatly together. The twigs and straws were a little
dry and a little dusty in themselves. There was the
big house and the little house; a tea party, a dinner

[198]

JANE AUSTEN

party, and an occasional picnic; life was hedged in by
valuable connections and adequate incomes ; by muddy
roads, wet feet, and a tendency on the part of the
ladies to get tired ; a little money supported it, a little
consequence, and the education commonly enjoyed by
upper middle-class families living in the country.
Vice, adventure, passion were left outside. But of
all this prosiness, of all this littleness, she evades noth¬
ing, and nothing is slurred over. Patiently and pre¬
cisely she tells us how they “made no stop anywhere
till they reached Newbury, where a comfortable meal,
uniting dinner and supper, wound up the enjoyments
and fatigues of the day”. Nor does she pay to con¬
ventions merely the tribute of lip homage ; she believes
in them besides accepting them. When she is describ¬
ing a clergyman, like Edmund Bertram, or a sailor, in
particular, she appears debarred by the sanctity of his
office from the free use of her chief tool, the comic
genius, and is apt therefore to lapse into decorous
panegyric or matter-of-fact description. But these are
exceptions; for the most part her attitude recalls the
anonymous ladies’ ejaculation — “A wit, a delineator
of character, who does not talk is terrific indeed!”
She wishes neither to reform nor to annihilate; she
is silent; and that is terrific indeed. One after another
she creates her fools, her prigs, her worldlings, her Mr.
Collins’, her Sir Walter Elliotts, her Mrs. Bennetts.
She encircles them with the lash of a whip-like phrase
which, as it runs round them, cuts out their silhouettes
for ever. But there they remain; no excuse is found

[199]

JANE AUSTEN

for them and no mercy shown them. Nothing remains
of Julia and Maria Bertram when she has done with
them; Lady Bertram is left “sitting and calling to Pug
and trying to keep him from the flower beds” eternally.
A divine justice is meted out; Dr. Grant, who begins
by liking his goose tender, ends by bringing on “apo¬
plexy and death, by three great institutionary dinners
in one week”. Sometimes it seems as if her creatures
were born merely to give Jane Austen the supreme de¬
light of slicing their heads off. She is satisfied ; she is
content ; she would not alter a hair on anybody’s head,
or move one brick or one blade of grass in a world
which provides her with such exquisite delight.

Nor, indeed, would we. For even if the pangs of
outraged vanity, or the heat of moral wrath, urged us
to improve away a world so full of spite, pettiness,
and folly, the task is beyond our powers. People are
like that — the girl of fifteen knew it; the mature
woman proves it. At this very moment some Lady
Bertram finds it almost too trying to keep Pug from
the flower beds; she sends Chapman to help Miss
Fanny, a little late. The discrimination is so perfect,
the satire so just that, consistent though it is, it almost
escapes our notice. No touch of pettiness, no hint of
spite, rouses us from our contemplation. Delight
strangely mingles with our amusement. Beauty illu¬
mines these fools.

That elusive quality is indeed often made up of
very different parts, which it needs a peculiar genius
to bring together. The wit of Jane Austen has for

[200]

JANE AUSTEN

partner the perfection of her taste. Her fool is a fool,
her snob is a snob, because he departs from the model
of sanity and sense which she has in mind, and con¬
veys to us unmistakably even while she makes us
laugh. Never did any novelist make more use of an
impeccable sense of human values. It is against the
disc of an unerring heart, an unfailing good taste, an
almost stern morality, that she shows up those devia¬
tions from kindness, truth, and sincerity which are
among the most delightful things in English literature.
She depicts a Mary Crawford in her mixture of good
and bad entirely by this means. She lets her rattle
on against the clergy, or in favour of a baronetage
and ten thousand a year with all the ease and spirit
possible ; but now and again she strikes one note of her
own, very quietly, but in perfect tune, and at once
all Mary Crawford’s chatter, though it continues to
amuse, rings flat. Hence the depth, the beauty, the
complexity of her scenes. From such contrasts there
comes a beauty, a solemnity even which are not only as
remarkable as her wit, but an inseparable part of it.
In The Watsons she gives us a foretaste of this power;
she makes us wonder why an ordinary act of kindness,
as she describes it, becomes so full of meaning. In her
masterpieces, the same gift is brought to perfection.
Here is nothing out of the way; it is midday in North¬
amptonshire; a dull young man is talking to rather a
weakly young woman on the stairs as they go up to
dress for dinner, with housemaids passing. But, from
triviality, from commonplace, their words become sud-

[201]

JANE AUSTEN

denly full of meaning, and the moment for both one
of the most memorable in their lives. It fills itself;
it shines ; it glows ; it hangs before us, deep, trembling,
serene for a second; next, the housemaid passes, and
this drop in which all the happiness of life has col¬
lected gently subsides again to become part of the ebb
and flow of ordinary existence.

What more natural then, with this insight into their
profundity, than that Jane Austen should have chosen
to write of the trivialities of day to day existence, of
parties, picnics, and country dances'? No “suggestions
to alter her style of writing” from the Prince Regent
or Mr. Clarke could tempt her; no romance, no ad¬
venture, no politics or intrigue could hold a candle
to life on a country-house staircase as she saw it. In¬
deed, the Prince Regent and his librarian had run their
heads against a very formidable obstacle; they were
trying to tamper with an incorruptible conscience, to
disturb an infallible discretion. The child who formed
her sentences so finely when she was fifteen never
ceased to form them, and never wrote for the Prince
Regent or his Librarian, but for the world at large.
She knew exactly what her powers were, and what
material they were fitted to deal with as material
should be dealt with by a writer, whose standard of
finality was high. There were impressions that lay
outside her province; emotions that by no stretch or
artifice could be properly coated and covered by her
own resources. For example, she could not make a
girl talk enthusiastically of banners and chapels. She

[202]

JANE AUSTEN

could not throw herself wholeheartedly into a roman¬
tic moment. She had all sorts of devices for evading
scenes of passion. Nature and its beauties she ap¬
proached in a sidelong way of her own. She describes
a beautiful night without once mentioning the moon.
Nevertheless, as we read the few formal phrases about
“the brilliancy of an unclouded night and the contrast
of the deep shade of the woods” the night is at once
as “solemn, and soothing, and lovely” as she tells us,
quite simply, that it was.

The balance of her gifts was singularly perfect.
Among her finished novels there are no failures, and
among her many chapters few that sink markedly
below the level of the others. But, after all, she died
at the age of forty-two. She died at the height of her
powers. She was still subject to those changes which
often make the final period of a writer’s career the
most interesting of all. Vivacious, irrepressible, gifted
with an invention of great vitality, there can be no
doubt that she would have written more, had she lived,
and it is tempting to consider whether she would
not have written differently. The boundaries were
marked; moons, mountains, and castles lay on the
other side. But was she not sometimes tempted to
trespass for a minute? Was she not beginning, in
her own gay and brilliant manner, to contemplate a
little voyage of discovery?

Let us take Persuasion, the last completed novel,
and look by its light at the books she might have
written had she lived. There is a peculiar beauty and

[203]

JANE AUSTEN

a peculiar dullness in Persuasion. The dullness is that
which so often marks the transition stage between two
different periods. The writer is a little bored. She
has grown too familiar with the ways of her world;
she no longer notes them freshly. There is an asperity
in her comedy which suggests that she has almost
ceased to be amused by the vanities of a Sir Walter
or the snobbery of a Miss Elliott. The satire is harsh,
and the comedy crude. She is no longer so freshly
aware of the amusements of daily life. Her mind is
not altogether on her object. But, while we feel that
Jane Austen has done this before, and done it better,
we also feel that she is trying to do something which
she has never yet attempted. There is a new element
in Persuasion , the quality, perhaps, that made Dr.
Whewell fire up and insist that it was “the most beau¬
tiful of her works”. She is beginning to discover that
the world is larger, more mysterious, and more roman¬
tic than she had supposed. We feel it to be true of
herself when she says of Anne: “She had been forced
into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as
she grew older — the natural sequel of an unnatural be¬
ginning”. She dwells frequently upon the beauty and
the melancholy of nature, upon the autumn where she
had been wont to dwell upon the spring. She talks of
the “influence so sweet and so sad of autumnal months
in the country”. She marks “the tawny leaves and
withered hedges”. “One does not love a place the less
because one has suffered in it”, she observes. But it is
not only in a new sensibility to nature that we detect

[204]

JANE AUSTEN

the change. Her attitude to life itself is altered. She
is seeing it, for the greater part of the book, through
the eyes of a woman who, unhappy herself, has a
special sympathy for the happiness and unhappiness of
others, which, until the very end, she is forced to com¬
ment upon in silence. Therefore the observation is less
of facts and more of feelings than is usual. There
is an expressed emotion in the scene at the concert
and in the famous talk about woman’s constancy
which proves not merely the biographical fact that
Jane Austen had loved, but the sesthetic fact that she
was no longer afraid to say so. Experience, when
it was of a serious kind, had to sink very deep, and
to be thoroughly disinfected by the passage of time,
before she allowed herself to deal with it in fiction.
But now, in 1817, she was ready. Outwardly, too,
in her circumstances, a change was imminent. Her
fame had grown very slowly. “I doubt”, wrote Mr.
Austen Leigh, “whether it would be possible to men¬
tion any other author of note whose personal ob¬
scurity was so complete.” Had she lived a few more
years only, all that would have been altered. She
would have stayed in London, dined out, lunched
out, met famous people, made new friends, read,
travelled, and carried back to the quiet country cot¬
tage a hoard of observations to feast upon at leisure.

And what effect would all this have had upon the
six novels that Jane Austen did not write? She would
not have written of crime, of passion, or of adventure.
She would not have been rushed by the importunity

[205]

/

JANE AUSTEN

of publishers or the flattery of friends into sloven¬
liness or insincerity. But she would have known more.
Her sense of security would have been shaken. Her
comedy would have suffered. She would have trusted
less (this is already perceptible in Per suasion) to dia¬
logue and more to reflection to give us a knowledge
of her characters. Those marvellous little speeches
which sum up, in a few minutes’ chatter, all that we
need in order to know an Admiral Croft or a Mrs.
Musgrove for ever, that shorthand, hit-or-miss method
which contains chapters of analysis and pyschology,
would have become too crude to hold all that she now
perceived of the complexity of human nature. She
would have devised a method, clear and composed as
ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for conveying
not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid ;
not only what they are, but what life is. She would
have stood farther away from her characters, and seen
them more as a group, less as individuals. Her satire,
while it played less incessantly, would have been more
stringent and severe. She would have been the fore¬
runner of Henry James and of Proust — but enough.
Vain are these speculations: the most perfect artist
among women, the writer whose books are immortal,
died “just as she was beginning to feel confidence in
her own success”.

[206]

Modern Fiction

In making any survey, even the freest and loosest,
of modern fiction it is difficult not to take it for
granted that the modern practice of the art is some¬
how an improvement upon the old. With their sim¬
ple tools and primitive materials, it might be said,
Fielding did well and Jane Austen even better, but
compare their opportunities with ours ! Their master¬
pieces certainly have a strange air of simplicity. And
yet the analogy between literature and the process,
to choose an example, of making motor cars scarcely
holds good beyond the first glance. It is doubtful
whether in the course of the centuries, though we
have learnt much about making machines, we have
learnt anything about making literature. We do not
come to write better; all that we can be said to do is
to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in
that, but with a circular tendency should the whole
course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty
pinnacle. It need scarcely be said that we make no
claim to stand, even momentarily, upon that vantage
ground. On the flat, in the crowd, half blind with
dust, we look back with envy to those happier war¬
riors, whose battle is won and whose achievements
wear so serene an air of accomplishment, that we can
scarcely refrain from whispering that the fight was
not so fierce for them as for us. It is for the historian

[207]

MODERN FICTION

of literature to decide; for him to say if we are now
beginning or ending or standing in the middle of a
great period of prose fiction, for down in the plain
little is visible. We only know that certain grati¬
tudes and hostilities inspire us; that certain paths
seem to lead to fertile land, others to the dust and
the desert; and of this perhaps it may be worth while
to attempt some account.

Our quarrel, then, is not with the classics, and if
we speak of quarrelling with Mr. Wells, Mr. Ben¬
nett, and Mr. Galsworthy it is partly that by the mere
fact of their existence in the flesh their work has a
living, breathing, every-day imperfection which bids
us take what liberties with it we choose. But it is
also true that, while we thank them for a thousand
gifts, we reserve our unconditional gratitude for Mr.
Hardy, for Mr. Conrad, and in a much lesser degree
for the Mr. Hudson, of The Turtle Land, Green
Mansions , and Far Away and Long Ago. Mr. Wells,
Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy have excited so
many hopes and disappointed them so persistently
that our gratitude largely takes the form of thanking
them for having shown us what they might have done
but have not done; what we certainly could not do,
but as certainly, perhaps, do not wish to do. No
single phrase will sum up the charge or grievance
which we have to bring against a mass of work so
large in its volume and embodying so many qualities,
both admirable and the reverse. If we tried to for¬
mulate our meaning in one word we should say that

[208]

modern fiction

these three writers are materialists. It is because they
are concerned not with the spirit but with the body
that they have disappointed us, and left us with the
feeling that the sooner English fiction turns its back
upon them, as politely as may be, and marches, if
only into the desert, the better for its soul. Natu¬
rally, no single word reaches the centre of three sepa¬
rate targets. In the case of Mr. Wells it falls notably
wide of the mark. And yet even with him it indi¬
cates to our thinking the fatal alloy in his genius,
the great clod of clay that has got itself mixed up
with the purity of his inspiration. But Mr. Bennett
is perhaps the worst culprit of the three, inasmuch
as he is by far the best workman. He can make a
book so well constructed and solid in its craftsman¬
ship that it is difficult for the most exacting of critics
to see through what chink or crevice decay can creep
in. There is not so much as a draught between the
frames of the windows, or a crack in the boards. And
yet — if life should refuse to live there? That is a
risk which the creator of The Old Wives’ Tale, George
Cannon, Edwin Clayhanger, and hosts of other figures,
may well claim to have surmounted. His characters
live abundantly, even unexpectedly, but it remains to
ask how do they live, and what do they live for?
More and more they seem to us, deserting even the
well-built villa in the Five Towns, to spend their
time in some softly padded first-class railway car¬
riage, pressing bells and buttons innumerable; and
the destiny to which they travel so luxuriously be-

[209]

MODERN FICTION

comes more and more unquestionably an eternity of
bliss spent in the very best hotel in Brighton. It can
scarcely be said of Mr. Wells that he is a materialist
in the sense that he takes too much delight in the
solidity of his fabric. His mind is too generous in
its sympathies to allow him to spend much time in
making things shipshape and substantial. He is a
materialist from sheer goodness of heart, taking upon
his shoulders the work that ought to have been dis¬
charged by Government officials, and in the plethora
of his ideas and facts scarcely having leisure to
realise, or forgetting to think important, the crudity
and coarseness of his human beings. Yet what more
damaging criticism can there be both of his earth and
of his Heaven than that they are to be inhabited
here and hereafter by his Joans and his Peters'? Does
not the inferiority of their natures tarnish whatever
institutions and ideals may be provided for them by
the generosity of their creator? Nor, profoundly
though we respect the integrity and humanity of Mr.
Galsworthy, shall we find what we seek in his pages.

If we fasten, then, one label on all these books, on
which is one word materialists, wTe mean by it that
they write of unimportant things; that they spend
immense skill and immense industry making the
trivial and the transitory appear the true and the
enduring.

We have to admit that we are exacting, and, fur¬
ther, that we find it difficult to justify our discontent
by explaining what it is that we exact. We frame

[210]

MODERN FICTION

our question differently at different times. But it
reappears most persistently as we drop the finished
novel on the crest of a sigh — Is it worth while?
What is the point of it all? Can it be that owing to
one of those little deviations which the human spirit
seems to make from time to time Mr. Bennett has
come down with his magnificent apparatus for catch¬
ing life just an inch or two on the wrong side? Life
escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is
worth while. It is a confession of vagueness to have
to make use of such a figure as this, but we scarcely
better the matter by speaking, as critics are prone to
do, of reality. Admitting the vagueness which afflicts
all criticism of novels, let us hazard the opinion that
for us at this moment the form of fiction most in
vogue more often misses than secures the thing we
seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or
reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on,
and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-
fitting vestments as we provide. Nevertheless, we
go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our
two and thirty chapters after a design which more
and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds.
So much of the enormous labour of proving the
solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely
labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the
extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the
conception. The writer seems constrained, not by his
own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous
tyrant who has him in thrall to provide a plot, to

[2H]

MODERN FICTION

provide comedy, tragedy, love, interest, and an air of
probability embalming the whole so impeccable that
if all his figures were to come to life they would find
themselves dressed down to the last button of their
coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is
obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes,
more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a
momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages
fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this*?
Must novels be like this?

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from
being “like this”. Examine for a moment an ordi¬
nary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a
myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or
engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides
they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms ;
and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the
life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differ¬
ently from of old; the moment of importance came
not here but there; so that if a writer were a free man
and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not
what he must, if he could base his work upon his own
feeling and not upon convention, there would be no
plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catas¬
trophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single
button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have
it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically
arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent
envelope surrounding us from the beginning of con¬
sciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the nov-

[212]

MODERN FICTION

elist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncir¬
cumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity
it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and
external as possible? We are not pleading merely
for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the
proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom
would have us believe it.

It is, at any rate, in some such fashion as this that
we seek to define the quality which distinguishes the
work of several young writers, among whom Mr.
James Joyce is the most notable, from that of their
predecessors. They attempt to come closer to life,
and to preserve more sincerely and exactly what in¬
terests and moves them, even if to do so they must
discard most of the conventions which are commonly
observed by the novelist. Let us record the atoms as
they fall upon the mind in the order in which they
fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected
and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or
incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not
take it for granted that life exists more fully in what
is commonly thought big than in what is commonly
thought small. Any one who has read The Tor trait
of the Artist as a Young Man or, what promises to
be a far more interesting work, Ulysses,1 now appear¬
ing in the Little Review, will have hazarded some
theory of this nature as to Mr. Joyce’s intention. On
our part, with such a fragment before us, it is haz¬
arded rather than affirmed ; but whatever the intention

1 Written April 1919.

[213]

I

MODERN FICTION

of the whole there can be no question but that it is
of the utmost sincerity and that the result, difficult
or unpleasant as we may judge it, is undeniably im¬
portant. In contrast with those whom we have called
materialists Mr. Joyce is spiritual ; he is concerned at
all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost
flame which flashes its' messages through the brain,
and in order to preserve it he disregards with com¬
plete courage whatever seems to him adventitious,
whether it be probability, or coherence or any other
of these signposts which for generations have served
to support the imagination of a reader when called
upon to imagine what he can neither touch nor see.
The scene in the cemetery, for instance, with its bril¬
liancy, its sordidity, its incoherence, its sudden light¬
ning flashes of significance, does undoubtedly come so
close to the quick of the mind that, on a first reading
at any rate, it is difficult not to acclaim a masterpiece.
If we want life itself here, surely we have it. Indeed,
we find ourselves fumbling rather awkwardly if we
try to say what else we wish, and for what reason a
work of such originality yet fails to compare, for we
must take high examples, with Youth or The Mayor
of Casterbridge. It fails because of the comparative
poverty of the writer’s mind, we might say simply
and have done with it. But it is possible to press a
little further and wonder whether we may not refer
our sense of being in a bright yet narrow room, con¬
fined and shut in, rather than enlarged and set free,
to some limitation imposed by the method as well as

[214]

MODERN FICTION

by the mind. Is it the method that inhibits the crea¬
tive power? Is it due to the method that we feel
neither jovial nor magnanimous, but centred in a self
which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never
embraces or creates what is outside itself and beyond?
Does the emphasis laid, perhaps didactically, upon
indecency, contribute to the effect of something
angular and isolated? Or is it merely that in any
effort of such originality it is much easier, for con¬
temporaries especially, to feel what it lacks than to
name what it gives? In any case it is a mistake to
stand outside examining “methods”. Any method is
right, every method is right, that expresses what we
wish to express, if we are writers ; that brings us closer
to the novelist’s intention if we are readers. This
method has the merit of bringing us closer to what we
were prepared to call life itself; did not the reading
of Ulysses suggest how much of life is excluded or
ignored, and did it not come with a shock to open
Tristram Shandy or even Pendennis and be by them
convinced that there are not only other aspects of
life, but more important ones into the bargain.

However this may be, the problem before the
novelist at present, as we suppose it to have been in
the past, is to contrive means of being free to set
down what he chooses. He has to have the courage
to say that what interests him is no longer “this” but
“that”: out of “that” alone must he construct his
work. For the moderns “that”, the point of interest,
lies very likely in the dark places of psychology. At

[215]

MODERN FICTION

once, therefore, the accent falls a little differently;
the emphasis is upon something hitherto ignored; at
once a different outline of form becomes necessary,
difficult for us to grasp, incomprehensible to our
predecessors. No one but a modern, perhaps no one
but a Russian, would have felt the interest of the
situation which Tchekov has made into the short story
which he calls “Gusev”. Some Russian soldiers lie ill
on board a ship which is taking them back to Russia.
We are given a few scraps of their talk and some of
their thoughts; then one of them dies and is carried
away; the talk goes on among the others for a time,
until Gusev himself dies, and looking “like a carrot
or a radish” is thrown overboard. The emphasis is
laid upon such unexpected places that at first it
seems as if there were no emphasis at all; and then,
as the eyes accustom themselves to twilight and dis¬
cern the shapes of things in a room we see how com¬
plete the story is, how profound, and how truly in
obedience to his vision Tchekov has chosen this, that,
and the other, and placed them together to compose
something new. But it is impossible to say “this is
comic”, or “that is tragic”, nor are we certain, since
short stories, we have been taught, should be brief and
conclusive, whether this, which is vague and incon¬
clusive, should be called a short story at all.

The most elementary remarks upon modern English
fiction can hardly avoid some mention of the Russian
influence, and if the Russians are mentioned one runs
the risk of feeling that to write of any fiction save

[216]

MODERN FICTION

theirs is waste of time. If we want understanding of
the soul and heart where else shall we find it of com¬
parable profundity4? If we are sick of our own ma¬
terialism the least considerable of their novelists has
by right of birth a natural reverence for the human
spirit. “Learn to make yourself akin to people. . . .
But let this sympathy be not with the mind — for it
is easy with the mind — but with the heart, with love
towards them.” In every great Russian writer we
seem to discern the features of a saint, if sympathy
for the sufferings of others, love towards them,
endeavour to reach some goal worthy of the most
exacting demands of the spirit constitute saintliness.
It is the saint in them which confounds us with a
feeling of our own irreligious triviality, and turns so
many of our famous novels to tinsel and trickery.
The conclusions of the Russian mind, thus compre¬
hensive and compassionate, are inevitably, perhaps, of
the utmost sadness. More accurately indeed we
might speak of the inconclusiveness of the Russian
mind. It is the sense that there is no answer, that if
honestly examined life presents question after ques¬
tion which must be left to sound on and on after the
story is over in hopeless interrogation that fills us
with a deep, and finally it may be with a resentful,
despair. They are right perhaps ; unquestionably they
see further than we do and without our gross impedi¬
ments of vision. But perhaps we see something that
escapes them, or why should this voice of protest mix
itself with our gloom? The voice of protest is the

[217]

MODERN FICTION

voice of another and an ancient civilisation which
seems to have brecTin us the instinct to enjoy and
fight rather than to suffer and understand. English
fiction from Sterne to Meredith bears witness to our
natural delight in humour and comedy, in the beauty
of earth, in the activities of the intellect, and in the
splendour of the body. But any deductions that we
may draw from the comparison of two fictions so
immeasurably far apart are futile save indeed as they
flood us with a view of the infinite possibilities of the
art and remind us that there is no limit to the horizon,
and that nothing — no “method”, no experiment, even
of the wildest — is forbidden, but only falsity and
pretence. “The proper stuff of fiction” does not
exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every
feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and
spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.
And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive
and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid
us break her and bully her, as well as honour and
love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sov¬
ereignty assured.

[218]

Jane Eyre and
MS uthering Heights

Of the hundred years that have passed since Char¬
lotte Bronte was born, she, the centre now of so much
legend, devotion, and literature, lived but thirty-nine.
It is strange to reflect how different those legends
might have been had her life reached the ordinary
human span. She might have become, like some of
her famous contemporaries, a figure familiarly met
with in London and elsewhere, the subject of pictures
and anecdotes innumerable, the writer of many novels,
of memoirs possibly, removed from us well within
the memory of the middle-aged in all the splendour
of established fame. She might have been wealthy,
she might have been prosperous. But it is not so.
When we think of her we have to imagine some one
who had no lot in our modern world; we have to cast
our minds back to the ’fifties of the last century, to
a remote parsonage upon the wild Yorkshire moors.
In that parsonage, and on those moors, unhappy and
lonely, in her poverty and her exaltation, she remains
for ever.

These circumstances, as they affected her character,
may have left their traces on her work. A novelist,
we reflect, is bound to build up his structure with

1 Written in 1916.

[219]

JANE EYRE

much very perishable material which begins by lend¬
ing it reality and ends by cumbering it with rubbish.
As we open Jane Eyre once more we cannot stifle the
suspicion that we shall find her world of imagination
as antiquated, mid-Victorian, and out of date as the
parsonage on the moor, a place only to be visited by
the curious, only preserved by the pious. So we open
Jane Eyre; and in two pages every doubt is swept
clean from our minds.

Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand;
to the left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not
separating me from the drear November day. At intervals,
while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect
of that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered a pale blank of
mist and cloud; near, a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat
shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a
long and lamentable blast.

There is nothing there more perishable than the
moor itself, or more subject to the sway of fashion
than the “long and lamentable blast”. Nor is this
exhilaration short-lived. It rushes us through the
entire volume, without giving us time to think, with¬
out letting us lift our eyes from the page. So intense
is our absorption that if some one moves in the room
the movement seems to take place not there but up
in Yorkshire. The writer has us by the hand, forces
us along her road, makes us see what she sees, never
leaves us for a moment or allows us to forget her.1

1 Charlotte and Emily Bronte had much the same sense of colour.

. . we saw — ;ah! it was beautiful — a splendid place carpeted with
crimson, and crimson-covered chairs and tables, and a pure white ceil-

[220]

JANE EYRE

At the end we are steeped through and through with
the genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Char¬
lotte Bronte. Remarkable faces, figures of strong
outline and gnarled feature have flashed upon us in
passing; but it is through her eyes that we have seen
them. Once she is gone, we seek for them in vain.
Think of Rochester and we have to think of Jane
Eyre. Think of the moor, and again, there is Jane
Eyre. Think of the drawing-room, even, those “white
carpets on which seemed laid brilliant garlands of
flowers”, that “pale Parian mantelpiece” with its
Bohemia glass of “ruby red” and the “general blend¬
ing of snow and fire” — what is all that except Jane
Eyre?

The drawbacks of being Jane Eyre are not far to
seek. Always to be a governess and always to be in
love is a serious limitation in a world which is full,
after all, of people who are neither one nor the other.
The characters of a Jane Austen or of a Tolstoi have
a million facets compared with these. They live and
are complex by means of their effect upon many dif¬
ferent people who serve to mirror them in the round.
They move hither and thither whether their creators

ing bordered by gold, a shower of glass drops hanging in silver chains
from the centre, and shimmering with little soft tapers” ( Wuthering
Heights). Yet it was merely a very pretty drawing-room, and within
it a boudoir, both spread with white carpets, on which seemed laid
brilliant garlands of flowers; both ceiled with snowy mouldings of
white grapes and vine leaves, beneath which glowed in rich contrast
crimson couches and ottomans ; while the ornaments on the pale Parian
mantelpiece were of sparkling Bohemia glass, ruby red; and between
the windows large mirrors repeated the general blending of snow and
fire.

[221]

JANE EYRE

watch them or not, and the world in which they live
seems to us an independent world which we can visit,
now that they have created it, by ourselves. Thomas
Hardy is more akin to Charlotte Bronte in the power
of his personality and the narrowness of his vision.
But the differences are vast. As we read Jude the
Obscure we are not rushed to a finish; we brood and
ponder and drift away from the text in plethoric
trains of thought which build up round the characters
an atmosphere of question and suggestion of which
they are themselves, as often as not, unconscious.
Simple peasants as they are, we are forced to confront
them with destinies and questionings of the hugest
import, so that often it seems as if the most impor¬
tant characters in a Hardy novel are those which have
no names. Of this power, of this speculative curi¬
osity, Charlotte Bronte has no trace. She does not
attempt to solve the problems of human life; she is
even unaware that such problems exist; all her force,
and it is the more tremendous for being constricted,
goes into the assertion, £T love”, “I hate”, “I suffer”.

For the self-centred and self-limited writers have
a power denied the more catholic and broad-minded.
Their impressions are close packed and strongly
stamped between their narrow walls. Nothing issues
from their minds which has not been marked with
their own impress. They learn little from other
writers, and what they adopt they cannot assimilate.
Both Hardy and Charlotte Bronte appear to have
founded their styles upon a stiff and decorous jour-

[222]

JANE EYRE

nalism. The staple of their prose is awkward and
unyielding. But both with labour and the most ob¬
stinate integrity by thinking every thought until it
has subdued words to itself, have forged for them¬
selves a prose which takes the mould of their minds
entire ; which has, into the bargain, a beauty, a power,
a swiftness of its own. Charlotte Bronte, at least,
owed nothing to the reading of many books. She
never learnt the smoothness of the professional writer,
or acquired his ability to stuff and sway his language
as he chooses. “I could never rest in communication
with strong, discreet, and refined minds, whether male
or female,” she writes, as any leader-writer in a pro¬
vincial journal might have written; but gathering
fire and speed goes on in her own authentic voice “till
I had passed the outworks of conventional reserve
and crossed the threshold of confidence, and won a
place by their hearts’ very hearthstone”. It is there
that she takes her seat; it is the red and fitful glow
of the heart’s fire which illumines her page. In other
words, we read Charlotte Bronte not for exquisite
observation of character — her characters are vigorous
and elementary; not for comedy — hers is grim and
crude ; not for a philosophic view of life — hers is that
of a country parson’s daughter; but for her poetry.
Probably that is so with all writers who have, as she
has, an overpowering personality, who, as we should
say in real life, have only to open the door to make
themselves felt. There is in them some untamed
ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order

[223]

JANE EYRE

of things which makes them desire to create instantly
rather than to observe patiently. This very ardour,
rejecting half shades and other minor impediments,
wings its way past the daily conduct of ordinary peo¬
ple and allies itself with their more inarticulate pas¬
sions. It makes them poets, or, if they choose to write
in prose, intolerant of its restrictions. Hence it is
that both Emily and Charlotte are always invoking
the help of nature. They both feel the need of some
more powerful symbol of the vast and slumbering
passions in human nature than words or actions can
convey. It is with a description of a storm that
Charlotte ends her finest novel Villette. “The skies
hang full and dark — a wrack sails from the west; the
clouds cast themselves into strange forms.” So she
calls in nature to describe a state of mind which could
not otherwise be expressed. But neither of the sisters
observed nature accurately as Dorothy Wordsworth
observed it, or painted it minutely as Tennyson
painted it. They seized those aspects of the earth
which were most akin to what they themselves felt
or imputed to their characters, and so their storms,
their moors, their lovely spaces of summer weather
are not ornaments applied to decorate a dull page or
display the writer’s powers of observation — they carry
on the emotion and light up the meaning of the book.

The meaning of a book, which lies so often apart
from what happens and what is said and consists
rather in some connection which things in themselves
different have had for the writer, is necessarily hard

[224]

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

to grasp. Especially this is so when, like the Brontes,
the writer is poetic, and his meaning inseparable from
his language, and itself rather a mood than a par¬
ticular observation. W uthering Heights is a more
difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre, because
Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. When
Charlotte wrote she said with eloquence and splen¬
dour and passion “I love”, “I hate”, “I suffer”. Her
experience, though more intense, is on a level with
our own. But there is no “I” in W uthering Heights.
There are no governesses. There are no employers.
There is love, but it is not the love of men and women.
Emily was inspired by some more general conception.
The impulse which urged her to create was not her
own suffering or her own injuries. She looked out
upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt
within her the power to unite it in a book. That
gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel —
a struggle, half thwarted but of superb conviction, to
say something through the mouths of her characters
which is not merely “I love” or “I hate”, but “we,
the whole human race” and “you, the eternal powers
. . the sentence remains unfinished. It is not
strange that it should be so; rather it is astonishing
that she can make us feel what she had it in her to
say at all. It surges up in the half-articulate words
of Catherine Earnshaw, “If all else perished and he
remained, I should still continue to be ; and if all else
remained and he were annihilated, the universe would
turn to a mighty stranger; I should not seem part of

[225]

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

it”. It breaks out again in the presence of the dead.
“I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break,
and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless
hereafter — the eternity they have entered — where life
is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy
and joy in its fulness.” It is this suggestion of power
underlying the apparitions of human nature, and lift¬
ing them up into the presence of greatness that gives
the book its huge stature among other novels. But it
was not enough for Emily Bronte to write a few
lyrics, to utter a cry, to express a creed. In her poems
she did this once and for all, and her poems will per¬
haps outlast her novel. But she was novelist as well
as poet. She must take upon herself a more laborious
and a more ungrateful task. She must face the fact
of other existences, grapple with the mechanism of
external things, build up, in recognisable shape, farms
and houses and report the speeches of men and women
who existed independently of herself. And so we
reach these summits of emotion not by rant or rhap¬
sody but by hearing a girl sing old songs to herself
as she rocks in the branches of a tree; by watching
the moor sheep crop the turf ; by listening to the soft
wind breathing through the grass. The life at the
farm with all its absurdities and its improbability is
laid open to us. We are given every opportunity of
comparing Wuthering Heights with a real farm and
Heathcliff with a real man. How, we are allowed to
ask, can there be truth or insight or the finer shades
of emotion in men and women who so little resemble

[22 6]

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

what we have seen ourselves? But even as we ask it
we see in Heathcliff the brother that a sister of genius
might have seen; he is impossible we say, but never¬
theless no boy in literature has so vivid an existence
as his. So it is with the two Catherines; never could
women feel as they do or act in their manner, we say.
All the same, they are the most lovable women in
English fiction. It is as if she could tear up all that
we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognis¬
able transparences with such a gust of life that they
transcend reality. Hers, then, is the rarest of all
powers. She could free life from its dependence on
facts; with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face
so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor
make the wind blow and the thunder roar.

[22 7]

George Eliot

To read George Eliot attentively is to become aware
how little one knows about her. It is also to become
aware of the credulity, not very creditable to one’s
insight, with which, half consciously and partly mali¬
ciously, one had accepted the late Victorian version
of a deluded woman who held phantom sway over
subjects even more deluded than herself. At what
moment, and by what means her spell was broken it
is difficult to ascertain. Some people attribute it to
the publication of her Life. Perhaps George Mere¬
dith, with his phrase about the “mercurial little show¬
man” and the “errant woman” on the dais, gave point
and poison to the arrows of thousands incapable of
aiming them so accurately, but delighted to let fly.
She became one of the butts for youth to laugh at,
the convenient symbol of a group of serious people
who were all guilty of the same idolatry and could
be dismissed with the same scorn. Lord Acton had
said that she was greater than Dante ; Herbert
Spencer exempted her novels, as if they were not
novels, when he banned all fiction from the London
Library. She was the pride and paragon of her sex.
Moreover, her private record was not more alluring
than her public. Asked to describe an afternoon at
the Priory, the story-teller always intimated that the
memory of those serious Sunday afternoons had come

[229]

GEORGE ELIOT

to tickle his sense of humour. He had been so much
alarmed by the grave lady in her low chair; he had
been so anxious to say the intelligent thing. Cer¬
tainly, the talk had been very serious, as a note in the
fine clear hand of the great novelist bore witness. It
was dated on the Monday morning, and she accused
herself of having spoken without due forethought of
Marivaux when she meant another ; but no doubt, she
said, her listener had already supplied the correction.
Still, the memory of talking about Marivaux to
George Eliot on a Sunday afternoon was not a ro¬
mantic memory. It had faded writh the passage of
the years. It had not become picturesque.

Indeed, one cannot escape the conviction that the
long, heavy face with its expression of serious and
sullen and almost equine power has stamped itself
depressingly upon the minds of people who remember
George Eliot, so that it looks out upon them from
her pages. Mr. Gosse has lately described her as he
saw her driving through London in a victoria —

a large, thick-set sybil, dreamy and immobile, whose massive
features, somewhat grim when seen in profile, were incongru¬
ously bordered by a hat, always in the height of Paris fashion,
which in those days commonly included an immense ostrich
feather.

Lady Ritchie, with equal skill, has left a more inti¬
mate indoor portrait: '

She sat by the fire in a beautiful black satin gown, with a
green shaded lamp on the table beside her, where I saw Ger-

[230]

GEORGE E LIOT

man books lying and pamphlets and ivory paper-cutters. She
was very quiet and noble, with two steady little eyes and a
sweet voice. As I looked I felt her to be a friend, not exactly
a personal friend, but a good and benevolent impulse.

A scrap of her talk is preserved. “We ought to re¬
spect our influence,” she said. “We know by our
own experience how very much others affect our lives,
and we must remember that we in turn must have the
same effect upon others.” Jealously treasured, com¬
mitted to memory, one can imagine recalling the
scene, repeating the words, thirty years later and
suddenly, for the first time, bursting into laughter.

In all these records one feels that the recorder,
even when he was in the actual presence, kept his
distance and kept his head, and never read the novels
in later years with the light of a vivid, or puzzling,
or beautiful personality dazzling in his eyes. In
fiction, where so much of personality is revealed, the
absence of charm is a great lack; and her critics, who
have been, of course, mostly of the opposite sex, have
resented, half consciously perhaps, her deficiency in
a quality which is held to be supremely desirable in
women. George Eliot was not charming; she was
not strongly feminine; she had none of those eccen¬
tricities and inequalities of temper which give to so
many artists the endearing simplicity of children.
One feels that to most people, as to Lady Ritchie, she
was “not exactly a personal friend, but a good and
benevolent impulse”. But if we consider these por¬
traits more closely we shall find that they are all the

[231]

GEORGE ELIOT

portraits of an elderly celebrated woman, dressed in
black satin, driving in her victoria, a woman who has
been through her struggle and issued from it with a
profound desire to be of use to others, but with no
wish for intimacy, save with the little circle who had
known her in the days of her youth. We know very
little about the days of her youth; but we do know
that the culture, the philosophy, the fame, and the
influence were all built upon a very humble founda¬
tion — she was the grand-daughter of a carpenter.

The first volume of her life is a singularly depress¬
ing record. In it we see her raising herself with
groans and struggles from the intolerable boredom of
petty provincial society (her father had risen in the
world and become more middle class, but less pic¬
turesque) to be the assistant editor of a highly intel¬
lectual London review, and the esteemed companion
of Herbert Spencer. The stages are painful as she
reveals them in the sad soliloquy in which Mr. Cross
condemned her to tell the story of her life. Marked
in early youth as one “sure to get something up very
soon in the way of a clothing club”, she proceeded to
raise funds for restoring a church by making a chart
of ecclesiastical history; and that was followed by a
loss of faith which so disturbed her father that he
refused to live with her. Next came the struggle with
the translation of Strauss, which, dismal and “soul-
stupefying” in itself, can scarcely have been made
less so by the usual feminine tasks of ordering a
household and nursing a dying father, and the dis-

[232]

GEORGE E LIOT

tressing conviction, to one so dependent upon affec¬
tion, that by becoming a blue-stocking she was for¬
feiting her brother’s respect. “I used to go about like
an owl,” she said, “to the great disgust of my
brother.” “Poor thing,” wrote a friend who saw her
toiling through Strauss with a statue of the risen
Christ in front of her, “I do pity her sometimes, with
her pale sickly face and dreadful headaches, and
anxiety, too, about her father.” Yet, though we can¬
not read the story without a strong desire that the
stages of her pilgrimage might have been made, if
not more easy, at least more beautiful, there is a
dogged determination in her advance upon the citadel
of culture which raises it above our pity. Her de¬
velopment was very slow and very awkward, but it
had the irresistible impetus behind it of a deep-seated
and noble ambition. Every obstacle at length was
thrust from her path. She knew every one. She read
everything. Her astonishing intellectual vitality had
triumphed. Youth was over, but youth had been full
of suffering. Then, at the age of thirty-five, at the
height of her powers, and in the fullness of her free¬
dom, she made the decision which was of such pro¬
found moment to her and still matters even to us,
and went to Weimar, alone with George Henry Lewes.

The books which followed so soon after her union
testify in the fullest manner to the great liberation
which had come to her with personal happiness. In
themselves they provide us with a plentiful feast.
Yet at the threshold of her literary career one may

[233]

GEORGE ELIOT

find in some of the circumstances of her life influences
that turned her mind to the past, to the country vil¬
lage, to the quiet and beauty and simplicity of childish
memories and away from herself and the present.
We understand how it was that her first book was
Scenes of Clerical Life , and not Middlemarch. Her
union with Lewes had surrounded her with affection,
but in view of the circumstances and of the conven¬
tions it had also isolated her. “I wish it to be under¬
stood,” she wrote in 1857, “that I should never in¬
vite any one to come and see me who did not ask
for the invitation.” She had been “cut off from what
is called the world”, she said later, but she did not
regret it. By becoming thus marked, first by circum¬
stances and later, inevitably, by her fame, she lost the
power to move on equal terms unnoted among her
kind; and the loss for a novelist was serious. Still,
basking in the light and sunshine of Scenes of Clerical
Life , feeling the large mature mind spreading itself
with a luxurious sense of freedom in the world of
her “remotest past”, to speak of loss seems inappro¬
priate. Everything to such a mind was gain. All
experience filtered down through layer after layer of
perception and reflection, enriching and nourishing.
The utmost we can say, in qualifying her attitude
towards fiction by what little we know of her life, is
that she had taken to heart certain lessons not usually
learnt early, if learnt at all, among which, perhaps,
the most branded upon her was the melancholy virtue
of tolerance; her sympathies are with the everyday

[234]

GEORGE ELIOT

lot, and play most happily in dwelling upon the
homespun of ordinary joys and sorrows. She has
none of that romantic intensity which is connected
with a sense of one’s own individuality, unsated and
unsubdued, cutting its shape sharply upon the back¬
ground of the world. What were the loves and sor¬
rows of a snuffy old clergyman, dreaming over his
whisky, to the fiery egotism of Jane Eyre? The
beauty of those first books, Scenes of Clerical Life ,
Adam Bede , The Mill on the Floss , is very great.
It is impossible to estimate the merit of the Poysers,
the Dodsons, the Gilfils, the Bartons, and the rest
with all their surroundings and dependencies, because
they have put on flesh and blood and we move among
them, now bored, now sympathetic, but always with
that unquestioning acceptance of all that they say and
do, which we accord to the great originals only. The
flood of memory and humour which she pours so
spontaneously into one figure, one scene after another,
until the whole fabric of ancient rural England is
revived, has so much in common with a natural
process that it leaves us with little consciousness that
there is anything to criticise. We accept; we feel
the delicious warmth and release of spirit which the
great creative writers alone procure for us. As one
comes back to the books after years of absence they
pour out, even against our expectation, the same store
of energy and heat, so that we want more than any¬
thing to idle in the warmth as in the sun beating
down from the red orchard wall. If there is an ele-

[235]

GEORGE ELIOT

ment of unthinking abandonment in thus submitting
to the humours of Midland farmers and their wives,
that, too, is right in the circumstances. We scarcely
wish to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply
human. And when we consider how distant in time
the world of Shepperton and Hayslope is, and how
remote the minds of farmer and agricultural labourers
from those of most of George Eliot’s readers, we can
only attribute the ease and pleasure with which we
ramble from house to smithy, from cottage parlour
to rectory garden, to the fact that George Eliot makes
us share their lives, not in a spirit of condescension
or of curiosity, but in a spirit of sympathy. She is
no satirist. The movement of her mind was too slow
and cumbersome to lend itself to comedy. But she
gathers in her large grasp a great bunch of the main
elements of human nature and groups them loosely
together with a tolerant and wholesome understand¬
ing which, as one finds upon re-reading, has not only
kept her figures fresh and free, but has given them an
unexpected hold upon our laughter and tears. There
is the famous Mrs. Poyser. It would have been easy
to work her idiosyncrasies to death, and, as it is, per¬
haps, George Eliot gets her laugh in the same place
a little too often. But memory, after the book is
shut, brings out, as sometimes in real life, the details
and subtleties which some more salient characteristic
has prevented us from noticing at the time. We
recollect that her health was not good. There were
occasions upon which she said nothing at all. She

[236]

GEORGE ELIOT

was patience itself with a sick child. She doted upon
Totty. Thus one can muse and speculate about the
greater number of George Eliot’s characters and find,
even in the least important, a roominess and margin
where those qualities lurk which she has no call to
bring from their obscurity.

But in the midst of all this tolerance and sympathy
there are, even in the early books, moments of greater
stress. Her humour has shown itself broad enough
to cover a wide range of fools and failures, mothers
and children, dogs and flourishing midland fields,
farmers, sagacious or fuddled over their ale, horse-
dealers, inn-keepers, curates, and carpenters. Over
them all broods a certain romance, the only romance
that George Eliot allowed herself — the romance of
the past. The books are astonishingly readable and
have no trace of pomposity or pretence. But to the
reader who holds a large stretch of her early work in
view it will become obvious that the mist of recollec¬
tion gradually withdraws. It is not that her power
diminishes, for, to our thinking, it is at its highest in
the mature Middlemarch, the magnificent book which
with all its imperfections is one of the few English
novels written for grown-up people. But the world
of fields and farms no longer contents her. In real
life she had sought her fortunes elsewhere; and though
to look back into the past was calming and consoling,
there are, even in the early works, traces of that
troubled spirit, that exacting and questioning and
baffled presence who was George Eliot herself. In

[237]

»

GEORGE ELIOT

Adam Bede there is a hint of her in Dinah. She
shows herself far more openly and completely in
Maggie in The Mill on the Floss. She is Janet in
Janet's Repentance , and Romola, and Dorothea seek¬
ing wisdom and finding one scarcely knows what in
marriage with Ladislaw. Those who fall foul of
George Eliot do so, we incline to think, on account of
her heroines; and with good reason; for there is no
doubt that they bring out the worst of her, lead her
into difficult places, make her self-conscious, didactic,
and occasionally vulgar. Yet if you could delete the
whole sisterhood you would leave a much smaller and
a much inferior world, albeit a world of greater
artistic perfection and far superior jollity and com¬
fort. In accounting for her failure, in so far as it was
a failure, one recollects that she never wrote a story
until she was thirty-seven, and that by the time she
was thirty-seven she had come to think of herself with
a mixture of pain and something like resentment. For
long she preferred not to think of herself at all.
Then, when the first flush of creative energy was ex¬
hausted and self-confidence had come to her, she wrote
more and more from the personal standpoint, but she
did so without the unhesitating abandonment of the
young. Her self-consciousness is always marked when
her heroines say what she herself would have said.
She disguised them in every possible way. She
granted them beauty and wealth into the bargain ; she
invented, more improbably, a taste for brandy. But
the disconcerting and stimulating fact remained that

[238]

GEORGE E LIOT

she was compelled by the very power of her genius
to step forth in person upon the quiet bucolic
scene.

The noble and beautiful girl who insisted upon
being born into the Mill on the Floss is the most
obvious example of the ruin which a heroine can
strew about her. Humour controls her and keeps her
lovable so long as she is small and can be satisfied
by eloping with the gipsies or hammering nails into
her doll; but she develops; and before George Eliot
knows what has happened she has a full-grown woman
on her hands demanding what neither gipsies nor
dolls, nor St. Ogg’s itself is capable of giving her.
First Philip Wakem is produced, and later Stephen
Guest. The weakness of the one and the coarseness
of the other have often been pointed out; but both,
in their weakness and coarseness, illustrate not so
much George Eliot’s inability to draw the portrait of
a man, as the uncertainty, the infirmity, and the fum¬
bling which shook her hand when she had to conceive
a fit mate for a heroine. She is in the first place
driven beyond the home world she knew and loved,
and forced to set foot in middle-class drawing-rooms
where young men sing all the summer morning and
young women sit embroidering smoking-caps for
bazaars. She feels herself out of her element, as her
clumsy satire of what she calls “good society” proves.

Good society has its claret and its velvet carpets, its dinner
engagements six weeks deep, its opera, and its faery ball rooms
. . . gets its science done by Faraday and its religion by the

[239]

GEORGE ELIOT

superior clergy who are to be met in the best houses ; how
should it have need of belief and emphasis'?

There is no trace of humour or insight there, but only
the vindictiveness of a grudge which we feel to be
personal in its origin. But terrible as the complexity
of our social system is in its demands upon the sym¬
pathy and discernment of a novelist straying across
the boundaries, Maggie Tulliver did worse than drag
George Eliot from her natural surroundings. She in¬
sisted upon the introduction of the great emotional
scene. She must love ; she must despair ; she must be
drowned clasping her brother in her arms. The more
one examines the great emotional scenes the more
nervously one anticipates the brewing and gathering
and thickening of the cloud which will burst upon our
heads at the moment of crisis in a shower of disillu¬
sionment and verbosity. It is partly that her hold
upon dialogue, when it is not dialect, is slack; and
partly that she seems to shrink with an elderly dread
of fatigue from the effort of emotional concentration.
She allows her heroines to talk too much. She has
little verbal felicity. She lacks the unerring taste
which chooses one sentence and compresses the heart
of the scene within that. “Whom are you going to
dance with?” asked Mr. Knightley, at the Westons’
ball. “With you, if you will ask me,” said Emma;
and she has said enough. Mrs. Casaubon would have
talked for an hour and we should have looked out of
the window.

[240]

GEORGE ELIOT

Yet, dismiss the heroines without sympathy, con¬
fine George Eliot to the agricultural world of her
“remotest past”, and you not only diminish her great¬
ness but lose her true flavour. That greatness is here
we can have no doubt. The width of the prospect,
the large strong outlines of the principal features, the
ruddy light of the early books, the searching power
and reflective richness of the later tempt us to linger
and expatiate beyond our limits. But it is upon the
heroines that we would cast a final glance. “I have
always been finding out my religion since I was a
little girl,” says Dorothea Casaubon. “I used to pray
so much — now I hardly ever pray. I try not to have
desires merely for myself. . . .” She is speaking for
them all. That is their problem. They cannot live
without religion, and they start out on the search for
one when they are little girls. Each has the deep
feminine passion for goodness, which makes the place
where she stands in aspiration and agony the heart
of the book — still and cloistered like a place of wor¬
ship, but that she no longer knows to whom to pray.
In learning they seek their goal ; in the ordinary tasks
of womanhood; in the wider service of their kind.
They do not find what they seek, and we cannot won¬
der. The ancient consciousness of woman, charged
with suffering and sensibility, and for so many ages
dumb, seems in them to have brimmed and overflowed
and utteted a demand for something — they scarcely
know what — for something that is perhaps incom¬
patible with the facts of human existence. George

[241]

GEORGE ELIOT

Eliot had far too strong an intelligence to tamper with
those facts, and too broad a humour to mitigate the
truth because it was a stern one. Save for the supreme
courage of their endeavour, the struggle ends, for her
heroines, in tragedy, or in a compromise that is even
more melancholy. But their story is the incomplete
version of the story of George Eliot herself. For her,
too, the burden and the complexity of womanhood
were not enough ; she must reach beyond the sanctuary
and pluck for herself the strange bright fruits of art
and knowledge. Clasping them as few women have
ever clasped them, she would not renounce her own
inheritance — the difference of view, the difference of
standard — nor accept an inappropriate reward. Thus
we behold her, a memorable figure, inordinately
praised and shrinking from her fame, despondent, re¬
served, shuddering back into the arms of love as if
there alone were satisfaction and, it might be, justi¬
fication, at the same time reaching out with “a fas¬
tidious yet hungry ambition” for all that life could
offer the free and inquiring mind and confronting her
feminine aspirations with the real world of men.
Triumphant was the issue for her, whatever it may
have been for her creations, and as we recollect all
that she dared and achieved, how with every obstacle
against her — sex and health and convention — she
sought more knowledge and more freedom till the
body, weighted with its double burden, sank worn
out, we must lay upon her grave whatever we have
it in our power to bestow of laurel and rose.

[242]

The Russian Point of View

Doubtful as we frequently are whether either the
French or the Americans, who have so much in com¬
mon with us, can yet understand English literature,
we must admit graver doubts whether, for all their en¬
thusiasm, the English can understand Russian litera¬
ture. Debate might protract itself indefinitely as to
what we mean by “understand”. Instances will occur
to everybody of American writers in particular who
have written with the highest discrimination of our
literature and of ourselves; who have lived a lifetime
among us, and finally have taken legal steps to become
subjects of King George. For all that, have they un¬
derstood us, have they not remained to the end of their
days foreigners*? Could any one believe that the
novels of Henry James were written by a man who
had grown up in the society which he describes, or that
his criticism of English writers was written by a man
who had read Shakespeare without any sense of the
Atlantic Ocean and two or three hundred years on the
far side of it separating his civilisation from ours^ A
special acuteness and detachment, a sharp angle of
vision the foreigner will often achieve; but not that
absence of self-consciousness, that ease and fellowship
and sense of common values which make for intimacy,
and sanity, and the quick give and take of familiar in¬
tercourse.

[243]

THE RUSSIAN POINT OF VIEW

Not only have we all this to separate us from Rus¬
sian literature, but a much more serious barrier — the
difference of language. Of all those who feasted upon
Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Tchekov during the past
twenty years, not more than one or two perhaps have
been able to read them in Russian. Our estimate of
their qualities has been formed by critics who have
never read a word of Russian, or seen Russia, or even
heard the language spoken by natives; who have had
to depend, blindly and implicitly, upon the work of
translators.

What we are saying amounts to this, then, that we
have judged a whole literature stripped of its style.
When you have changed every word in a sentence from
Russian to English, have thereby altered the sense a
little, the sound, weight, and accent of the words in
relation to each other completely, nothing remains
except a crude and coarsened version of the sense.
Thus treated, the great Russian writers are like men
deprived by an earthquake or a railway accident not
only of all their clothes, but also of something subtler
and more important — their manners, the idiosyncrasies
of their characters. What remains is, as the English
have proved by the fanaticism of their admira¬
tion, something very powerful and very impressive,
but it is difficult to feel sure, in view of these muti¬
lations, how far we can trust ourselves not to impute,
to distort, to read into them an emphasis which is
false.

They have lost their clothes, we say, in some terrible

[244]

THE RUSSIAN POINT OF VIEW

catastrophe, for some such figure as that describes the
simplicity, the humanity, startled out of all effort to
hide and disguise its instincts, which Russian literature,
whether it is due to translation, or to some more
profound cause, makes upon us. We find these qual-
ties steeping it through, as obvious in the lesser writers
as in the greater. “Learn to make yourselves akin to
people. I would even like to add: make yourself in¬
dispensable to them. But let this sympathy be not
with the mind — for it is easy with the mind — but with
the heart, with love towards them.” “From the Rus¬
sian,” one would say instantly, wherever one chanced
on that quotation. The simplicity, the absence of
effort, the assumption that in a world bursting with
misery the chief call upon us is to understand our
fellow-sufferers, “and not with the mind — for it is easy
with the mind — but with the heart” — this is the cloud
which broods above the whole of Russian literature,
which lures us from our own parched brilliancy and
scorched thoroughfares to expand in its shade — and
of course with disastrous results. We become awkward
and self-conscious; denying our own qualities, we write
with an affectation of goodness and simplicity which is
nauseating in the extreme. We cannot say “Brother”
with simple conviction. There is a story by Mr. Gals¬
worthy in which one of the characters so addresses an¬
other (they are both in the depths of misfortune).
Immediately everything becomes strained and affected.
The English equivalent for “Brother” is “Mate” — a
very different word, with something sardonic in it, an

[245]

THE RUSSIAN POINT OF VIEW

indefinable suggestion of humour. Met though they
are in the depths of misfortune the two Englishmen
who thus accost each other will, we are sure, find a
job, make their fortunes, spend the last years of their
lives in luxury, and leave a sum of money to prevent
poor devils from calling each other “Brother” on the
Embankment. But it is common suffering, rather than
common happiness, effort, or desire that produces the
sense of brotherhood. It is the “deep sadness” which
Dr. Hagberg Wright finds typical of the Russian peo¬
ple that creates their literature.

A generalisation of this kind will, of course, even if
it has some degree of truth when applied to the body
of literature, be changed profoundly when a writer of
genius sets to work on it. At once other questions
arise. It is seen that an “attitude” is not simple; it
is highly complex. Men reft of their coats and their
manners, stunned by a railway accident, say hard
things, harsh things, unpleasant things, difficult things,
even if they say them with the abandonment and sim¬
plicity which catastrophe has bred in them. Our first
impressions of Tchekov are not of simplicity but of be¬
wilderment. What is the point of it, and why does he
make a story out of this? we ask as we read story after
story. A man falls in love with a married woman, and
they part and meet, and in the end are left talking
about their position and by what means they can be
free from “this intolerable bondage”.

“ £How? How?’ he asked, clutching his head. . . .
And it seemed as though in a little while the solution

[246]

THE RUSSIAN POINT OF VIEW

would be found and then a new and splendid life
would begin.” That is the end. A postman drives
a student to the station and all the way the student
tries to make the postman talk, but he remains silent.
Suddenly the postman says unexpectedly, “It’s against
the regulations to take any one with the post.” And
he walks up and down the platform with a look of
anger on his face. “With whom was he angry? Was
it with people, with poverty, with the autumn nights?”
Again, that story ends.

But is it the end, we ask? We have rather the feel¬
ing that we have overrun our signals; or it is as if
a tune had stopped short without the expected chords
to close it. These stories are inconclusive, we say, and
proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assump¬
tion that stories ought to conclude in a way that we
recognise. In so doing we raise the question of our
own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar
and the end emphatic — lovers united, villains dis¬
comfited, intrigues exposed — as it is in most Victorian
fiction, we can scarcely go wrong, but where the tune
is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or
merely the information that they went on talking, as
it is in Tchekov, we need a very daring and alert sense
of literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular
those last notes which complete the harmony. Prob¬
ably we have to read a great many stories before we
feel, and the feeling is essential to our satisfaction, that
we hold the parts together, and that Tchekov was
not merely rambling disconnectedly, but struck now

[247]

THE RUSSIAN POINT OF VIEW

this note, now that with intention, in order to complete
his meaning.

We have to cast about in order to discover where
the emphasis in these strange stories rightly comes.
Tchekov’s own words give us a lead in the right di¬
rection. . . such a conversation as this between
us”, he says, “would have been unthinkable for our
parents. At night they did not talk, but slept sound ;
we, our generation, sleep badly, are restless, but talk a
great deal, and are always trying to settle whether we
are right or not.” Our literature of social satire and
psychological finesse both sprang from that restless
sleep, that incessant talking; but after all, there is an
enormous difference between Tchekov and Henry
James, between Tchekov and Bernard Shaw. Obvi¬
ously — but where does it arise? Tchekov, too, is aware
of the evils and injustices of the social state; the
condition of the peasants appals him, but the reform¬
er’s zeal is not his — that is not the signal for us to stop.
The mind interests him enormously; he is a most subtle
and delicate analyst of human relations. But again,
no; the end is not there. Is it that he is primarily
interested not in the soul’s relation with other souls,
but with the soul’s relation to health — with the soul’s
relation to goodness? These stories are always show¬
ing us some affectation, pose, insincerity. Some woman
has got into a false relation; some man has been
perverted by the inhumanity of his circumstances.
The soul is ill ; the soul is cured ; the soul is not cured.
Those are the emphatic points in his stories.

[248]

THE RUSSIAN POINT OF VIEW

Once the eye is used to these shades, half the “con¬
clusions” of fiction fade into thin air; they show like
transparences with a light behind them — gaudy, glar¬
ing, superficial. The general tidying up of the last
chapter, the marriage, the death, the statement of
values so sonorously trumpeted forth, so heavily un¬
derlined, become of the most rudimentary kind.
Nothing is solved, we feel; nothing is rightly held
together. On the other hand, the method which at first
seemed so casual, inconclusive, and occupied with
trifles, now appears the result of an exquisitely original
and fastidious taste, choosing boldly, arranging in¬
fallibly, and controlled by an honesty for which we
can find no match save among the Russians them¬
selves. There may be no answer to these questions,
but at the same time let us never manipulate the
evidence so as to produce something fitting, decorous,
agreeable to our vanity. This may not be the way to
catch the ear of the public; after all, they are used to
louder music, fiercer measures ; but as the tune sounded,
so he has written it. In consequence, as we read these
little stories about nothing at all, the horizon widens;
the soul gains an astonishing sense of freedom.

In reading Tchekov we find ourselves repeating the
word “soul” again and again. It sprinkles his pages.
Old drunkards use it freely; “. . . you are high up
in the service, beyond all reach, but haven’t real soul,
my dear boy . . . there’s no strength in it.” Indeed,
it is the soul that is the chief character in Russian fic¬
tion. Delicate and subtle in Tchekov, subject to an in-

[249]

THE RUSSIAN POINT OF VIEW

finite number of humours and distempers, it is of
greater depth and volume in Dostoevsky, liable to
violent diseases and raging fevers, but still the pre¬
dominant concern. Perhaps that is why it needs so
great an effort on the part of an English reader to read
The Brothers Karamazov or The Possessed a second
time. The “soul” is alien to him. It is even anti¬
pathetic. It has little sense of humour and no sense
of comedy. It is formless. It has slight connection
with the intellect. It is confused, diffuse, tumultuous,
incapable, it seems, of submitting to the control of logic
or the discipline of poetry. The novels of Dostoevsky
are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, water¬
spouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are
composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul.
Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round,
blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a
giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more
exciting reading. We open the door and find ourselves
in a room full of Russian generals, the tutors of Rus¬
sian generals, their step-daughters and cousins and
crowds of miscellaneous people who are all talking at
the tops of their voices about their most private af¬
fairs. But where are we? Surely it is the part of a
novelist to inform us whether we are in an hotel, a
flat, or hired lodging. Nobody thinks of explaining.
We are souls, tortured, unhappy souls, whose only
business it is to talk, to reveal, to confess, to draw up
at whatever rending of flesh and nerve those crabbed
sins which crawl on the sand at the bottom of us. But,

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THE RUSSIAN POINT OF VIEW

as we listen, our confusion slowly settles. A rope is
flung to us; we catch hold of a soliloquy; holding on
by the skin of our teeth, we are rushed through the
water; feverishly, wildly, we rush on and on, now sub¬
merged, now in a moment of vision understanding
more than we have ever understood before, and re¬
ceiving such revelations as we are wont to get only
from the press of life at its fullest. As we fly we
pick it all up — the names of the people, their rela¬
tionships, that they are staying in an hotel at Roulet-
tenburg, that Polina is involved in an intrigue with the
Marquis de Grieux — but what unimportant matters
these are compared with the soul ! It is the soul that
matters, its passion, its tumult, its astonishing medley
of beauty and vileness. And if our voices suddenly rise
into shrieks of laughter, or if we are shaken by the
most violent sobbing, what more natural1? — it hardly
calls for remark. The pace at which we are living is
so tremendous that sparks must rush off our wheels
as we fly. Moreover, when the speed is thus increased
and the elements of the soul are seen, not separately in
scenes of humour or scenes of passion as our slower
English minds conceive them, but streaked, involved,
inextricably confused, a new panorama of the human
mind is revealed. The old divisions melt into each
other. Men are at the same time villains and saints;
their acts are at once beautiful and despicable. We
love and we hate at the same time. There is none of
that precise division between good and bad to which
we are used. Often those for whom we feel most affec-

[251]

THE RUSSIAN POINT OF VIEW

tion are the greatest criminals, and the most abject sin¬
ners move us to the strongest admiration as well as
love.

Dashed to the crest of the waves, bumped and bat¬
tered on the stones at the bottom, it is difficult for
an English reader to feel at ease. The process to which
he is accustomed in his own literature is reversed. If
we wished to tell the story of a General’s love affair
(and we should find it very difficult in the first place
not to laugh at a General), we should begin with his
house; we should solidify his surroundings. Only
when all was ready should we attempt to deal with the
General himself. Moreover, it is not the samovar but
the teapot that rules in England ; time is limited ; space
crowded; the influence of other points of view, of
other books, even of other ages, makes itself felt.
Society is sorted out into lower, middle, and upper
classes, each with its own traditions, its own manners,
and, to some extent, its own language. Whether he
wishes it or not, there is a constant pressure upon an
English novelist to recognise these barriers, and, in
consequence, order is imposed on him and some kind
of form; he is inclined to satire rather than to com¬
passion, to scrutiny of society rather than understand¬
ing of individuals themselves.

No such restraints were laid on Dostoevsky. It is
all the same to him whether you are noble or simple,
a tramp or a great lady. Whoever you are, you are
the vessel of this perplexed liquid, this cloudy, yeasty,
precious stuff, the soul. The soul is not restrained

[252]

THE RUSSIAN POINT OF VIEW

by barriers. It overflows, it floods, it mingles with
the souls of others. The simple story of a bank clerk
who could not pay for a bottle of wine spreads, before
we know what is happening, into the lives of his
father-in-law and the five mistresses whom his father-
in-law treated abominably, and the postman’s life, and
the charwoman’s, and the Princesses’ who lodged in
the same block of flats ; for nothing is outside Dostoev¬
sky’s province ; and when he is tired, he does not stop,
he goes on. He cannot restrain himself. Out it
tumbles upon us, hot, scalding, mixed, marvellous,
terrible, oppressive — the human soul.

There remains the greatest of all novelists — for
what else can we call the author of War and Peace?
Shall we find Tolstoi, too, alien, difficult, a foreigner?
Is there some oddity in his angle of vision which, at
any rate until we have become disciples and so lost
our bearings, keeps us at arm’s length in suspicion and
bewilderment? From his first words we can be sure
of one thing at any rate — here is a man who sees
what we see, who proceeds, too, as we are accustomed
to proceed, not from the inside outwards, but from
the outside inwards. Here is a world in which the
postman’s knock is heard at eight o’clock, and people
go to bed between ten and eleven. Here is a man, too,
who is no savage, no child of nature; he is educated;
he has had every sort of experience. He is one of
those born aristocrats who have used their privileges
to the full. He is metropolitan, not suburban. His
senses, his intellect, are acute, powerful, and well

[253]

THE RUSSIAN POINT OF VIEW

nourished. There is something proud and superb in
the attack of such a mind and such a body upon life.
Nothing seems to escape him. Nothing glances off
him unrecorded. Nobody, therefore, can so convey
the excitement of sport, the beauty of horses, and all
the fierce desirability of the world to the senses of a
strong young man. Every twig, every feather sticks
to his magnet. He notices the blue or red of a child’s
frock; the way a horse shifts its tail; the sound of a
cough; the action of a man trying to put his hands
into pockets that have been sewn up. And what his
infallible eye reports of a cough or a trick of the hands
his infallible brain refers to something hidden in the
character so that we know his people, not only by the
way they love and their views on politics and the
immortality of the soul, but also by the way they
sneeze and choke. Even in a translation we feel that
we have been set on a mountain-top and had a telescope
put into our hands. Everything is astonishingly clear
and absolutely sharp. Then, suddenly, just as we are
exulting, breathing deep, feeling at once braced and
purified, some detail — perhaps the head of a man —
comes at us out of the picture in an alarming way, as
if extruded by the very intensity of its life. “Suddenly
a strange thing happened to me: first I ceased to see
what was around me; then his face seemed to vanish
till only the eyes were left, shining over against mine;
next the eyes seemed to be in my own head, and then
all became confused — I could see nothing and was
forced to shut my eyes, in order to break loose from

[254]

THE RUSSIAN POINT OF VIEW

the feeling of pleasure and fear which his gaze was
producing in me. . . Again and again we share
Masha’s feelings in Family Happiness. One shuts
one’s eyes to escape the feeling of pleasure and fear.
Often it is pleasure that is uppermost. In this very
story there are two descriptions, one of a girl walking
in a garden at night with her lover, one of a newly
married couple prancing down their drawing-room,
which so convey the feeling of intense happiness that
we shut the book to feel it better. But always there
is an element of fear which makes us, like Masha, wish
to escape from the gaze which Tolstoi fixes on us.
Does it arise from the sense, which in real life might
harass us, that such happiness as he describes is too in¬
tense to last, that we are on the edge of disaster? Or
is it not that the very intensity of our pleasure is some¬
how questionable and forces us to ask, with Pozdnyshev
in the Kreutzer Sonata, “But why live?” Life domi¬
nates Tolstoi as the soul dominates Dostoevsky. There
is always at the centre of all the brilliant and flashing
petals of the flower this scorpion, “Why live?”
There is always at the centre of the book some Olenin,
or Pierre, or Levin who gathers into himself all ex¬
perience, turns the world round between his fingers,
and never ceases to ask even as he enjoys it, what is the
meaning of it, and what should be our aims. It is not
the priest who shatters our desires most effectively;
it is the man who has known them, and loved them
himself. When he derides them, the world indeed
turns to dust and ashes beneath our feet. Thus fear

[255]

THE RUSSIAN POINT OF VIEW

mingles with our pleasure, and of the three great Rus¬
sian writers, it is Tolstoi who most enthralls us and
most repels.

But the mind takes its bias from the place of its
birth, and no doubt, when it strikes upon a literature
so alien as the Russian, flies off at a tangent far from
the truth.

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Outlines

I

MISS MITFORD

Speaking truthfully, Mary Russell Mitford and Her
Surroundings is not a good book. It neither enlarges
the mind nor purifies the heart. There is nothing in
it about Prime Ministers and not very much about
Miss Mitford. Yet, as one is setting out to speak the
truth, one must own that there are certain books which
can be read without the mind and without the heart,
but still with considerable enjoyment. To come to the
point, the great merit of these scrapbooks, for they
can scarcely be called biographies, is that they license
mendacity. One cannot believe what Miss Hill says
about Miss Mitford, and thus one is free to invent
Miss Mitford for oneself. Not for a second do we
accuse Miss Hill of telling lies. That infirmity is
entirely ours. For example: “Alresford was the birth¬
place of one who loved nature as few have loved her,
and whose writings ‘breathe the air of the hayfields and
the scent of the hawthorn boughs’, and seem to waft to
us ‘the sweet breezes that blow over ripened corn¬
fields and daisied meadows’.” It is perfectly true
that Miss Mitford was born at Alresford, and yet,
when it is put like that, we doubt whether she was ever
born at all. Indeed she was, says Miss Hill; she was

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OUTLINES

born “on the 16th December, 1787. ‘A pleasant house
in truth it was,’ Miss Mitford writes. ‘The breakfast-
room . . . was a lofty and spacious apartment.’ ”
So Miss Mitford was born in the breakfast-room about
eight-thirty on a snowy morning between the Doc¬
tor’s second and third cups of tea. “Pardon me,” said
Mrs. Mitford, turning a little pale, but not omitting
to add the right quantity of cream to her husband’s
tea, “I feel . . .” That is the way in which Men¬
dacity begins. There is something plausible and even
ingenious in her approaches. The touch about the
cream, for instance, might be called historical, for
it is well known that when Mary won £20,000 in the
Irish lottery, the Doctor spent it all upon Wedgwood
china, the winning number being stamped upon the
soup plates in the middle of an Irish harp, the whole
being surmounted by the Mitford arms, and encircled
by the motto of Sir John Bertram, one of William the
Conqueror’s knights, from wdiom the Mitfords claimed
descent. “Observe,” says Mendacity, “with what an
air the Doctor drinks his tea, and how she, poor lady,
contrives to curtsey as she leaves the room.” Tea? I
inquire, for the Doctor, though a fine figure of a man, is
already purple and profuse, and foams like a crimson
cock over the frill of his fine laced shirt. “Since the
ladies have left the room,” Mendacity begins, and goes
on to make up a pack of lies with the sole object of
proving that Dr. Mitford kept a mistress in the
purlieus of Reading and paid her money on the pre¬
tence that he was investing it in a new method of

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OUTLINES

lighting and heating houses invented by the Marquis
de Chavannes. It came to the same thing in the end
— to the King’s Bench Prison, that is to say; but
instead of allowing us to recall the literary and histor¬
ical associations of the place, Mendacity wanders off
to the window and distracts us again by the plati¬
tudinous remark that it is still snowing. There is
something very charming in an ancient snowstorm.
The weather has varied almost as much in the course
of generations as mankind. The snow of those days
was more formally shaped and a good deal softer
than the snow of ours, just as an eighteenth-century
cow was no more like our cows than she was like the
florid and fiery cows of Elizabethan pastures. Suffi¬
cient attention has scarcely been paid to this aspect of
literature, which, it cannot be denied, has its im¬
portance.

Our brilliant young men might do worse, when in
search of a subject, than devote a year or two to cows
in literature, snow in literature, the daisy in Chaucer
and in Coventry Patmore. At any rate, the snow falls
heavily. The Portsmouth mail-coach has already lost
its way; several ships have foundered, and Margate
pier has been totally destroyed. At Hatfield Peveral
twenty sheep have been buried, and though one sup¬
ports itself by gnawing wurzels which it has found near
it, there is grave reason to fear that the French king’s
coach has been blocked on the road to Colchester. It is
now the 16th of February, 1808.

Poor Mrs. Mitford! Twenty-one years ago she

[259]

OUTLINES

left the breakfast-room, and no news has yet been re¬
ceived of her child. Even Mendacity is a little
ashamed of itself, and, picking up Mary Russell Mil¬
ford and Her Surroundings , assures us that everything
will come right if we possess ourselves in patience.
The French king’s coach was on its way to Booking; at
Booking lived Lord and Lady Charles Murray-
Aynsley; and Lord Charles was shy. Lord Charles
had always been shy. Once when Mary Mitford was
five years old — sixteen years, that is, before the sheep
were lost and the French king went to Booking— Mary
“threw him into an agony of blushing by running up
to his chair in mistake for that of my papa”. He
had indeed to leave the room. Miss Hill, who, some¬
what strangely, finds the society of Lord and Lady
Charles pleasant, does not wish to quit it without
“introducing an incident in connection with them
which took place in the month of February, 1808”.
But is Miss Mitford concerned in it*? we ask, for there
must be an end of trifling. To some extent, that is
to say, Lady Charles was a cousin of the Mitfords,
and Lord Charles was shy. Mendacity is quite ready
to deal with “the incident” even on these terms; but,
we repeat, we have had enough of trifling. Miss Mit¬
ford may not be a great woman; for all we know she
was not even a good one; but we have certain respon¬
sibilities as a reviewer which we are not going to evade.

There is, to begin with, English literature. A sense
of the beauty of nature has never been altogether ab¬
sent, however much the cow may change from age to

[260]

OUTLINES

age, from English poetry. Nevertheless, the difference
between Pope and Wordsworth in this respect is very
considerable. Lyrical Ballads was published in 1798;
Our Village in 1824. One being in verse and the other
in prose, it is not necessary to labour a comparison
which contains, however, not only the elements of
justice, but the seeds of many volumes. Like her great
predecessor, Miss Mitford much preferred the country
to the town ; and thus, perhaps, it may not be inoppor¬
tune to dwell for a moment upon the King of Saxony,
Mary Anning, and the ichthyosaurus. Let alone the
fact that Mary Anning and Mary Mitford had a Chris¬
tian name in common, they are further connected by
what can scarcely be called a fact, but may, without
hazard, be called a probability. Miss Mitford was
looking for fossils at Lyme Regis only fifteen years be¬
fore Mary Anning found one. The King of Saxony
visited Lyme in 1844, and seeing the head of an ich¬
thyosaurus in Mary Anning’s window, asked her to
drive to Pinny and explore the rocks. While they were
looking for fossils, an old woman seated herself in the
King’s coach — was she Mary Mitford*? Truth com¬
pels us to say that she was not ; but there is no doubt,
and we are not trifling when we say it, that Mary Mit¬
ford often expressed a wish that she had known Mary
Anning, and it is singularly unfortunate to have to
state that she never did. For we have reached the
year 1844; Mary Mitford is fifty-seven years of age,
and so far, thanks to Mendacity and its trifling ways,
all we know of her is that she did not know Mary

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OUTLINES

Anning, had not found an ichthyosaurus, had not been
out in a snowstorm, and had not seen the King of
France.

It is time to wring the creature’s neck, and begin
again at the very beginning.

What considerations, then, had weight with Miss
Hill when she decided to write Mary Russell Mitford
and Her Surroundings ? Three emerge from the rest,
and may be held of paramount importance. In the
first place, Miss Mitford was a lady; in the second,
she was born in the year 1787; and in the third, the
stock of female characters who lend themselves to
biographic treatment by their own sex is, for one reason
or another, running short. For instance, little is known
of Sappho, and that little is not wholly to her credit.
Lady Jane Grey has merit, but is undeniably obscure.
Of George Sand, the more we know the less we ap¬
prove. George Eliot was led into evil ways which
not all her philosophy can excuse. The Brontes, how¬
ever highly we rate their genius, lacked that in¬
definable something which marks the lady; Harriet
Martineau was an atheist; Mrs. Browning was a mar¬
ried woman; Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, and Maria
Edgeworth have been done already ; so that, what with
one thing and another, Mary Russell Mitford is the
only woman left.

There is no need to labour the extreme importance
of the date when we see the word “surroundings” on
the back of a book. Surroundings, as they are called,
are invariably eighteenth-century surroundings. When

[262]

OUTLINES

we come, as of course we do, to that phrase which
relates how “as we looked upon the steps leading down
from the upper room, we fancied we saw the tiny fig¬
ure jumping from step to step”, it would be the gross¬
est outrage upon our sensibilities to be told that those
steps were Athenian, Elizabethan, or Parisian. They
were, of course, eighteenth-century steps, leading down
from the old panelled room into the shady garden,
where, tradition has it, William Pitt played marbles,
or, if we like to be bold, where on still summer days
we can almost fancy that we hear the drums of Bona¬
parte on the coast of France. Bonaparte is the limit
of the imagination on one side, as Monmouth is on the
other; it would be fatal if the imagination took to
toying with Prince Albert or sporting with King John.
But fancy knows her place, and there is no need to
labour the point that her place is the eighteenth cen¬
tury. The other point is more obscure. One must be
a lady. Yet what that means, and whether we like
what it means, may both be doubtful. If we say that
Jane Austen was a lady and that Charlotte Bronte was
not one, we do as much as need be done in the way of
definition, and commit ourselves to neither side.

It is undoubtedly because of their reticence that
Miss Hill is on the side of the ladies. They sigh
things off and they smile things off, but they never
seize the silver table by the legs or dash the teacups
on the floor. It is in many ways a great convenience
to have a subject who can be trusted to live a long life
without once raising her voice. Sixteen years is a

[263]

OUTLINES

considerable stretch of time, but of a lady it is enough
to say, “Here Mary Mitford passed sixteen years of
her life and here she got to know and love not only
their own beautiful grounds but also every turn of the
surrounding shady lanes.5’ Her loves were vegetable,
and her lanes were shady. Then, of course, she was
educated at the school where Jane Austen and Mrs.
Sherwood had been educated. She visited Lyme
Regis, and there is mention of the Cobb. She saw
London from the top of St. Paul’s, and London was
much smaller then than it is now. She changed from
one charming house to another, and several distin¬
guished literary gentlemen paid her compliments and
came to tea. When the dining-room ceiling fell down
it did not fall on her head, and when she took a ticket
in a lottery she did win the prize. If in the foregoing
sentences there are any words of more than two syl¬
lables, it is our fault and not Miss Hill’s; and to do
that writer justice, there are not many whole sentences
in the book which are neither quoted from Miss Mit¬
ford nor supported by the authority of Mr. Crissy.

But how dangerous a thing is life ! Can one be sure
that anything not wholly made of mahogany will to
the very end stand empty in the sun‘? Even cupboards
have their secret springs, and when, inadvertently we
are sure, Miss Hill touches this one, out, terrible to
relate, topples a stout old gentleman. In plain Eng¬
lish, Miss Mitford had a father. There is nothing ac¬
tually improper in that. Many women have had fa¬
thers. But Miss Mitford’ s father was kept in a cup-

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OUTLIN ES

board; that is to say, he was not a nice father. Miss
Hill even goes so far as to conjecture that when “an
imposing procession of neighbours and friends” fol¬
lowed him to the grave, “we cannot help thinking that
this was more to show sympathy and respect for Miss
Mitford than from special respect for him”. Severe
as the judgement is, the gluttonous, bibulous, amorous
old man did something to deserve it. The less said
about him the better. Only, if from your earliest
childhood your father has gambled and speculated,
first with your mother’s fortune, then with your own,
spent your earnings, driven you to earn more, and spent
that too ; if in old age he has lain upon a sofa and in¬
sisted that fresh air is bad for daughters, if, dying at
length, he has left debts that can only be paid by sell¬
ing everything you have or sponging upon the charity
of friends — then even a lady sometimes raises her
voice. Miss Mitford herself spoke out once. “It was
grief to go; there I had toiled and striven and tasted
as deeply of bitter anxiety, of fear, and of hope as
often falls to the lot of woman.” What language for
a lady to use! for a lady, too, who owns a teapot.
There is a drawing of the teapot at the bottom of the
page. But it is now of no avail; Miss Mitford has
smashed it to smithereens. That is the worst of writ¬
ing about ladies; they have fathers as well as teapots.
On the other hand, some pieces of Dr. Mitford’s Wedg¬
wood dinner service are still in existence, and a copy
of Adam’s Geography, which Mary won as a prize at
school, is “in our temporary possession”. If there is

[265]

OUTLINES

nothing improper in the suggestion, might not the next
book be devoted entirely to them1?

II

DR. BENTLEY

As we saunter through those famous courts where
Dr. Bentley once reigned supreme we sometimes catch
sight of a figure hurrying on its way to Chapel or Hall
which, as it disappears, draws our thoughts enthusi¬
astically after it. For that man, we are told, has the
whole of Sophocles at his finger-ends ; knows Homer by
heart; reads Pindar as we read the Times; and spends
his life, save for these short excursions to eat and pray,
wholly in the company of the Greeks. It is true that
the infirmities of our education prevent us from appre¬
ciating his emendations as they deserve; his life’s work
is a sealed book to us ; none the less, we treasure up the
last flicker of his black gown, and feel as if a bird of
Paradise had flashed by us, so bright is his spirit’s
raiment, and in the murk of a November evening we
had been privileged to see it winging its way to roost
in fields of amaranth and beds of moly. Of all men,
great scholars are the most mysterious, the most august.
Since it is unlikely that we shall ever be admitted to
their intimacy, or see much more of them than a black
gown crossing a court at dusk, the best we can do is
to read their lives — for example, the Life of Dr. Bent¬
ley by Bishop Monk.

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OUTLINES

There we shall find much that is odd and little that
is reassuring. The greatest of our scholars, the man
who read Greek as the most expert of us read English
not merely with an accurate sense of meaning and
grammar but with a sensibility so subtle and wide¬
spread that he perceived relations and suggestions of
language which enabled him to fetch up from oblivion
lost lines and inspire new life into the little fragments
that remained, the man who should have been steeped
in beauty (if what they say of the Classics is true) as
a honey-pot is ingrained with sweetness was, on the
contrary, the most quarrelsome of mankind.

“I presume that there are not many examples of an
individual who has been a party in six distinct suits
before the Court of King’s Bench within the space of
three years”, his biographer remarks; and adds that
Bentley won them all. It is difficult to deny his con¬
clusion that though Dr. Bentley might have been a
first-rate lawyer or a great soldier “such a display
suited any character rather than that of a learned and
dignified clergyman”. Not all these disputes, how¬
ever, sprung from his love of literature. The charges
against which he had to defend himself were directed
against him as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
He was habitually absent from chapel; his expendi¬
ture upon building and upon his household was ex¬
cessive ; he used the college seal at meetings which did
not consist of the statutable number of sixteen, and
so on. In short, the career of the Master of Trinity
was one continuous series of acts of aggression and

[267]

OUTLINES

defiance, in which Dr. Bentley treated the Society of
Trinity College as a grown man might treat an im¬
portunate rabble of street boys. Did they dare to hint
that the staircase at the Lodge which admitted four
persons abreast was quite wide enough? — did they re¬
fuse to sanction his expenditure upon a new one?
Meeting them in the Great Court one evening after
chapel he proceeded urbanely to question them. They
refused to budge. Whereupon, with a sudden altera¬
tion of colour and voice, Bentley demanded whether
“they had forgotten his rusty sword?” Mr. Michael
Hutchinson and some others, upon whose backs the
weight of that weapon would have first descended,
brought pressure upon their seniors. The bill for
£350 was paid and their preferment secured. But
Bentley did not wait for this act of submission to finish
his staircase.

So it went on, year after year. Nor was the arro¬
gance of his behaviour always justified by the splen¬
dour or utility of the objects he had in view — the crea¬
tion of the Backs, the erection of an observatory, the
foundation of a laboratory. More trivial desires were
gratified with the same tyranny. Sometimes he
wanted coal; sometimes bread and ale; and then
Madame Bentley, sending her servant with a snuff¬
box in token of authority, got from the butteries at
the expense of the college a great deal more of these
commodities than the college thought that Dr. Bentley
ought to require. Again, when he had four pupils to
lodge with him who paid him handsomely for their

' [268]

OUTLINES

board, it was drawn from the College, at the command
of the snuff-box, for nothing. The principles of “deli¬
cacy and good feeling” which the Master might have
been expected to observe (great scholar as he was,
steeped in the wine of the classics) went for nothing.
His argument that the “few College loaves” upon
which the four young patricians were nourished were
amply repaid by the three sash windows which he had
put into their rooms at his own expense failed to con¬
vince the Fellows. And when, on Trinity Sunday
1719, the Fellows found the famous College ale not to
their liking, they were scarcely satisfied when the but¬
ler told them that it had been brewed by the Master’s
orders, from the Master’s malt, which was stored in
the Master’s granary, and though damaged by “an in¬
sect called the weevil” had been paid for at the very
high rates which the Master demanded.

Still these battles over bread and beer are trifles and
domestic trifles at that. His conduct in his profession
will throw more light upon our inquiry. For, released
from brick and building, bread and beer, patricians
and their windows, it may be found that he expanded
in the atmosphere of Homer, Horace, and Manilius,
and proved in his study the benign nature of those in¬
fluences which have been wafted down to us through
the ages. But there the evidence is even less to the
credit of the dead languages. He acquitted himself
magnificently, all agree, in the great controversy about
the letters of Phalaris. His temper was excellent and
his learning prodigious. But that triumph was suc-

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ceeded by a series of disputes which force upon us the
extraordinary spectacle of men of learning and genius,
of authority and divinity, brawling about Greek and
Latin texts, and calling each other names for all the
world like bookies on a racecourse or washerwomen in
a back street. For this vehemence of temper and viru¬
lence of language were not confined to Bentley alone ;
they appear unhappily characteristic of the profession
as a whole. Early in life, in the year 1691, a quarrel
was fastened upon him by his brother chaplain Hody
for writing Malelas, not as Hody preferred, Malela.
A controversy in which Bentley displayed learning and
wit, and Hody accumulated endless pages of bitter
argument against the letter s ensued. Hody was
worsted, and “there is too much reason to believe, that
the offence given by this trivial cause was never after¬
wards healed”. Indeed, to mend a line was to break a
friendship. James Gronovius of Leyden — “homun¬
culus eruditione mediocri, ingenio nullo”, as Bentley
called him-— attacked Bentley for ten years because
Bentley had succeeded in correcting a fragment of
Callimachus where he had failed.

But Gronovius was by no means the only scholar
who resented the success of a rival with a rancour that
grey hairs and forty years spent in editing the classics
failed to subdue. In all the chief towns of Europe lived
men like the notorious de Pauw of Utrecht, “a person
who has justly been considered the pest and disgrace
of letters”, who, when a new theory or new edition
appeared, banded themselves together to deride and

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humiliate the scholar. . . all his writings”, Bishop
Monk remarks of de Pauw, “prove him to be devoid
of candour, good faith, good manners, and every gen¬
tlemanly feeling: and while he unites all the defects
and bad qualities that were ever found in a critic or
commentator, he adds one peculiar to himself, an in¬
cessant propensity to indecent allusions.” With such
tempers and such habits it is not strange that the schol¬
ars of those days sometimes ended lives made intoler¬
able by bitterness, poverty, and neglect by their own
hands, like Johnson, who after a lifetime spent in the
detection of minute errors of construction, went mad
and drowned himself in the meadows near Notting¬
ham. On May 20, 1712, Trinity College was shocked
to find that the professor of Hebrew, Dr. Sike, had
hanged himself “some time this evening, before candle¬
light, in his sash”. When Kuster died, it was reported
that he, too, had killed himself. And so, in a sense, he
had. For when his body was opened “there was found
a cake of sand along the lower region of his belly.
This, I take it, was occasioned by his sitting nearly
double, and writing on a very low table, surrounded
with three or four circles of books placed on the
ground, which was the situation we usually found him
in.” The minds of poor schoolmasters, like John Ker
of the dissenting Academy, who had had the high
gratification of dining with Dr. Bentley at the Lodge,
when the talk fell upon the use of the word equidem ,
were so distorted by a lifetime of neglect and study
that they went home, collected all uses of the word

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equidem which contradicted the Doctor’s opinion, re¬
turned to the Lodge, anticipating in their simplicity a
warm welcome, met the Doctor issuing to dine with the
Archbishop of Canterbury, followed him down the
street in spite of his indifference and annoyance, and,
being refused even a word of farewell, went home to
brood over their injuries and wait the day of revenge.

But the bickerings and animosities of the smaller fry
were magnified, not obliterated, by. the Doctor him¬
self in the conduct of his own affairs. The courtesy
and good temper which he had shown in his early con¬
troversies had worn away. “. . . a course of violent
animosities and the indulgence of unrestrained indig¬
nation for many years had impaired both his taste and
judgement in controversy”, and he condescended,
though the subject in dispute was the Greek Testa¬
ment, to call his antagonist “maggot”, “vermin”,
“gnawing rat”, and “cabbage head”, to refer to the
darkness of his complexion, and to insinuate that his
wits were crazed, which charge he supported by dwell¬
ing on the fact that his brother, a clergyman, wore a
beard to his girdle.

Violent, pugnacious, and unscrupulous, Dr. Bentley
survived these storms and agitations, and remained,
though suspended from his degrees and deprived of
his mastership, seated at the Lodge imperturbably.
Wearing a broad-brimmed hat indoors to protect his
eyes, smoking his pipe, enjoying his port, and expound¬
ing to his friends his doctrine of the digamma, Bentley
lived those eighty years which, he said, were long

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enough “to read everything which was worth reading”,
“Et tunc”, he added, in his peculiar manner,

Et tunc magna mei sub terris ibit imago.

A small square stone marked his grave in Trinity Col¬
lege, but the Fellows refused to record upon it the
fact that he had been their Master.

But the strangest sentence in this strange story has
yet to be written, and Bishop Monk writes it as if it
were a commonplace requiring no comment. “For a
person who was neither a poet, nor possessed of poetical
taste to venture upon such a task was no common pre¬
sumption.” The task was to detect every slip of lan¬
guage in Paradise Lost , and all instances of bad taste
and incorrect imagery. The result was notoriously
lamentable. Yet in what, we may ask, did it differ
from those in which Bentley was held to have acquitted
himself magnificently? And if Bentley was incapable
of appreciating the poetry of Milton, how can we ac¬
cept his verdict upon Horace and Homer? And if we
cannot trust implicitly to scholars, and if the study of
Greek is supposed to refine the manners and purify the
soul — but enough. Our scholar has returned from
Hall; his lamp is lit; his studies are resumed; and it
is time that our profane speculations should have an
end. Besides, all this happened many, many years
ago.

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III

LADY DOROTHY NEVILL

She had stayed, in a humble capacity, for a week in
the ducal household. She had seen the troops of highly
decorated human beings descending in couples to eat,
and ascending in couples to bed. She had, surrepti¬
tiously, from a gallery, observed the Duke himself
dusting the miniatures in the glass cases, while the
Duchess let her crochet fall from her hands as if in
utter disbelief that the world had need of crochet.
From an upper window she had seen, as far as eye could
reach, gravel paths swerving round isles of greenery
and losing themselves in little woods designed to shed
the shade without the severity of forests; she had
watched the ducal carriage bowling in and out of the
prospect, and returning a different way from the way
it went. And what was her verdict1? “A lunatic asy¬
lum.”

It is true that she was a lady’s-maid, and that Lady
Dorothy Nevill, had she encountered her on the stairs,
would have made an opportunity to point out that that
is a very different thing from being a lady.

My mother never failed to point out the folly of work¬
women, shop-girls, and the like calling each other “Ladies”.
All this sort of thing seemed to her to be mere vulgar hum¬
bug, and she did not fail to say so.

What can we point out to Lady Dorothy Nevill? that
with all her advantages she had never learned to spell ?

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that she could not write a grammatical sentence? that
she lived for eighty-seven years and did nothing but
put food into her mouth and slip gold through her
fingers? But delightful though it is to indulge in
righteous indignation, it is misplaced if we agree with
the lady’s-maid that high birth is a form of congenital
insanity, that the sufferer merely inherits the diseases
of his ancestors, and endures them, for the most part
very stoically, in one of those comfortably padded
lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as
the stately homes of England.

Moreover, the Walpoles are not ducal. Horace
Walpole’s mother was a Miss Shorter; there is no
mention of Lady Dorothy’s mother in the present
volume, but her great-grandmother was Mrs. Oldfield
the actress, and, to her credit, Lady Dorothy was
“exceedingly proud” of the fact. Thus she was not
an extreme case of aristocracy; she was confined rather
to a bird-cage than to an asylum ; through the bars she
saw people walking at large, and once or twice she made
a surprising little flight into the open air. A gayer,
brighter, more vivacious specimen of the caged tribe
can seldom have existed ; so that one is forced at times
to ask whether what we call living in a cage is not the
fate that wise people, condemned to a single sojourn
upon earth, would choose. To be at large is, after
all, to be shut out; to waste most of life in accumulat¬
ing the money to buy and the time to enjoy what the
Lady Dorothys find clustering and glowing about
their cradles when their eyes first open — as hers

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opened in the year 1826 at number eleven Berkeley
Square. Horace Walpole had lived there. Her fa¬
ther, Lord Orford, gambled it away in one night’s
play the year after she was born. But Wolterton Hall,
in Norfolk, was full of carving and mantelpieces, and
there were rare trees in the garden, and a large and
famous lawn. No novelist could wish a more charm¬
ing and even romantic environment in which to set the
story of two little girls, growing up, wild yet secluded,
reading Bossuet with their governess, and riding out
on their ponies at the head of the tenantry on polling
day. Nor can one deny that to have had the author
of the following letter among one’s ancestors would
have been a source of inordinate pride. It is addressed
to the Norwich Bible Society, which had invited Lord
Orford to become its president:

I have long been addicted to the Gaming Table. I have
lately taken to the Turf. I fear I frequently blaspheme.
But I have never distributed religious tracts. All this was
known to you and your Society. Notwithstanding which you
think me a fit person to be your president. God forgive your
hypocrisy.

It was not Lord Orfold who was in the cage on that
occasion. But, alas! Lord Orford owned another
country house, Ilsington Hall, in Dorsetshire, and
there Lady Dorothy came in contact first with the mul¬
berry tree, and later with Mr. Thomas Hardy; and
we get our first glimpse of the bars. We do not pre¬
tend to the ghost of an enthusiasm for Sailors’ Homes

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in general; no doubt mulberry trees are much nicer to
look at; but when it comes to calling people “vandals”
who cut them down to build houses, and to having
footstools made from the wood, and to carving upon
those footstools inscriptions which testify that “often
and often has King George III. taken his tea” under
this very footstool, then we want to protest — “Surely
you must mean Shakespeare?” But as her subsequent
remarks upon Mr. Hardy tend to prove, Lady Dorothy
does not mean Shakespeare. She “warmly appre¬
ciated” the works of Mr. Hardy, and used to complain
“that the county families were too stupid to appreciate
his genius at its proper worth”. George the Third
drinking his tea; the county families failing to appre¬
ciate Mr. Hardy: Lady Dorothy is undoubtedly be¬
hind the bars.

Yet no story more aptly illustrates the barrier which
we perceive hereafter between Lady Dorothy and the
outer world than the story of Charles Darwin and the
blankets. Among her recreations Lady Dorothy made
a hobby of growing orchids, and thus got into touch
with “the great naturalist”. Mrs. Darwin, inviting
her to stay with them, remarked with apparent sim¬
plicity that she had heard that people who moved
much in London society were fond of being tossed in
blankets. “I am afraid,” her letter ended, “we should
hardly be able to offer you anything of that sort.”
Whether in fact the necessity of tossing Lady Dorothy
in a blanket had been seriously debated at Down, or
whether Mrs. Darwin obscurely hinted her sense of

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some incongruity between her husband and the lady
of the orchids, we do not know. But we have a sense
of two worlds in collision; and it is not the Darwin
world that emerges in fragments. More and more do
we see Lady Dorothy hopping from perch to perch,
picking at groundsel here, and at hempseed there, in¬
dulging in exquisite trills and roulades, and sharpen¬
ing her beak against a lump of sugar in a large, airy,
magnificently equipped bird-cage. The cake was full
of charming diversions. Now she illuminated leaves
which had been macerated to skeletons ; now she inter¬
ested herself in improving the breed of donkeys; next
she took up the cause of silkworms, almost threatened
Australia with a plague of them, and “actually suc¬
ceeded in obtaining enough silk to make a dress”;
again she was the first to discover that wood, gone
green with decay, can be made, at some expense, into
little boxes; she went into the question of funguses
and established the virtues of the neglected English
truffle; she imported rare fish; spent a great deal of
energy in vainly trying to induce storks and Cornish
choughs to breed in Sussex; painted on china; em¬
blazoned heraldic arms, and, attaching whistles to the
tails of pigeons, produced wonderful effects “as of an
aerial orchestra” when they flew through the air. To
the Duchess of Somerset belongs the credit of investi¬
gating the proper way of cooking guinea-pigs; but
Lady Dorothy was one of the first to serve up a dish of
these little creatures at luncheon in Charles Street.

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But all the time the door of the cage was ajar. Raids
were made into what Mr. Nevill calls “Upper Bohe¬
mia”; from which Lady Dorothy returned with “au¬
thors, journalists, actors, actresses, or other agreeable
and amusing people”. Lady Dorothy’s judgement is
proved by the fact that they seldom misbehaved, and
some indeed became quite domesticated, and wrote her
“very gracefully turned letters”. But once or twice
she made a flight beyond the cage herself. “These
horrors”, she said, alluding to the middle class, “are
so clever and we are so stupid ; but then look how well
they are educated, while our children learn nothing but
how to spend their parents’ money!” She brooded
over the fact. Something was going wrong. She was
too shrewd and too honest not to lay the blame partly
at least upon her own class. “I suppose she can just
about read?” she said of one lady calling herself cul¬
tured; and of another, “She is indeed curious and well
adapted to open bazaars.” But to our thinking her
most remarkable flight took place a year or two before
her death, in the Victoria and Albert Museum :

I do so agree with you, she wrote — though I ought not to
say so — that the upper class are very — I don’t know what to
say — but they seem to take no interest in anything — but golf¬
ing, etc. One day I was at the Victoria and Albert Museum,
just a few sprinkles of legs, for I am sure they looked too
frivolous to have bodies and souls attached to them — but what
softened the sight to my eyes were 2 little Japs poring over
each article with a handbook . . . our bodies, of course, gig-

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gling and looking at nothing. Still worse, not one soul of the
higher class visible : in fact I never heard of any one of them
knowing of the place, and for this we are spending millions —
it is all too painful.

It was all too painful, and the guillotine, she felt,
loomed ahead. That catastrophe she was spared, for
who could wish to cut off the head of a pigeon with a
whistle attached to its tail ? But if the whole bird-cage
had been overturned and the aerial orchestra sent
screaming and fluttering through the air, we can be
sure, as Mr. Joseph Chamberlain told her, that her
conduct would have been “a credit to the British
aristocracy”.

IV

ARCHBISHOP THOMSON

The origin of Archbishop Thomson was obscure.
His great-uncle “may reasonably be supposed” to
have been “an ornament to the middle classes”. His
aunt married a gentleman who was present at the mur¬
der of Gustavus III. of Sweden; and his father met
his death at the age of eighty-seven by treading on a
cat in the early hours of the morning. The physical
vigour which this anecdote implies was combined in
the Archbishop with powers of intellect which prom¬
ised success in whatever profession he adopted. At
Oxford it seemed likely that he would devote himself
to philosophy or science. While reading for his de¬
gree he found time to write the Outlines of the Laws

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of Thought , which “immediately became a recognised
text-book for Oxford classes”. But though poetry,
philosophy, medicine, and the law held out their temp¬
tations he put such thoughts aside, or never entertained
them, having made up his mind from the first to dedi¬
cate himself to Divine service. The measure of his
success in the more exalted sphere is attested by the fol¬
lowing facts: Ordained deacon in 1842 at the age of
twenty-three, he became Dean and Bursar of Queen’s
College, Oxford, in 1845; Provost in 1855, Bishop of
Gloucester and Bristol in 1861, and Archbishop of
York in 1862. Thus at the early age of forty-three
he stood next in rank to the Archbishop of Canterbury
himself ; and it was commonly though erroneously ex¬
pected that he would in the end attain to that dignity
also.

It is a matter of temperament and belief whether you
read this list with respect or with boredom; whether
you look upon an archbishop’s hat as a crown or as an
extinguisher. If, like the present reviewer, you are
ready to hold the simple faith that the outer order cor¬
responds to the inner — that a vicar is a good man, a
canon a better man, and an archbishop the best man of
all — you will find the study of the Archbishop’s life
one of extreme fascination. He has turned aside from
poetry and philosophy and law, and specialised in vir¬
tue. He has dedicated himself to the service of the
Divine. His spiritual proficiency has been such that
he has developed from deacon to dean, from dean to
bishop, and from bishop to archbishop in the short

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space of twenty years. As there are only two arch¬
bishops in the whole of England the inference seems to
be that he is the second best man in England; his hat
is the proof of it. Even in a material sense his hat
was one of the largest; it was larger than Mr. Glad¬
stone’s ; larger than Thackeray’s ; larger than Dickens’ ;
it was in fact, so his hatter told him and we are in¬
clined to agree, an “eight full”. Yet he began much
as other men begin. He struck an undergraduate in a
fit of temper and was rusticated ; he wrote a text-book
of logic and rowed a very good oar. But after he was
ordained his diary shows that the specialising process
had begun. He thought a great deal about the state
of his soul; about “the monstrous tumour of Simony”;
about Church reform ; and about the meaning of Chris¬
tianity. “Self-renunciation,” he came to the conclu¬
sion, “is the foundation of Christian Religion and
Christian Morals. . . . The highest wisdom is that
which can enforce and cultivate this self-renunciation.
Hence (against Cousin) I hold that religion is higher
far than philosophy.” There is one mention of chem¬
ists and capillarity, but science and philosophy were,
even at this early stage, in danger of being crowded
out. Soon the diary takes a different tone. “He
seems,” says his biographer, “to have had no time for
committing his thoughts to paper” ; he records his en¬
gagements only, and he dines out almost every night.
Sir Henry Taylor, whom he met at one of these par¬
ties, described him as “simple, solid, good, capable, and
pleasing”. Perhaps it was his solidity combined with

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his “eminently scientific” turn of mind, his blandness
as well as his bulk, that impressed some of these great
people with the confidence that in him the Church had
found a very necessary champion. His “brawny logic”
and massive frame seemed to fit him to grapple with a
task that taxed the strongest — how, that is, to recon¬
cile the scientific discoveries of the age with religion,
and even prove them “some of its strongest witnesses
for the truth”. If any one could do this Thomson
could; his practical ability, unhampered by any mysti¬
cal or dreaming tendency, had already proved itself in
the conduct of the business affairs of his College.
From Bishop he became almost instantly Archbishop;
and in becoming Archbishop he became Primate of
England, Governor of the Charterhouse and King’s
College, London, patron of one hundred and twenty
livings, with the Archdeaconries of York, Cleveland,
and the East Riding in his gift, and the Canonries and
Prebends in York Minster. Bishopthorpe itself was
an enormous palace; he was immediately faced by the
“knotty question” of whether to buy all the furniture
— “much of it only poor stuff” — or to furnish the house
anew, which would cost a fortune. Moreover there
were seven cows in the park; but these, perhaps, were
counterbalanced by nine children in the nursery. Then
the Prince and Princess of Wales came to stay, and
the Archbishop took upon himself the task of furnish¬
ing the Princess’s apartments. He went up to London
and bought eight Moderator lamps, two Spanish fig¬
ures holding candles, and reminded himself of the

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necessity of buying “soap for Princess”. But mean¬
while far more serious matters claimed every ounce of
his strength. Already he had been exhorted to “wield
the sure lance of your brawny logic against the sophis¬
tries” of the authors of Essays and Reviews , and had
responded in a work called Aids to Faith. Near at
hand the town of Sheffield, with its large population
of imperfectly educated working men, was a breeding
ground of scepticism and discontent. The Archbishop
made it his special charge. He was fond of watching
the rolling of armour plate, and constantly addressed
meetings of working men. “Now what are these Nihil-
isms, and Socialisms, and Communisms, and Fenian-
isms, and Secret Societies — what do they all mean?” he
asked. “Selfishness,” he replied, and “assertion of one
class against the rest is at the bottom of them all.”
There was a law of nature, he said, by which wages
went up and wages went down. “You must accept the
declivity as well as the ascent. ... If we could only
get people to learn that, then things would go on a
great deal better and smoother.” And the working
men of Sheffield responded by giving him five hundred
pieces of cutlery mounted in sterling silver. But pre¬
sumably there were a certain number of knives among
the spoons and the forks.

Bishop Colenso, however, was far more troublesome
than the working men of Sheffield; and the Ritualists
vexed him so persistently that even his vast strength
felt the strain. The questions which were referred to
him for decision were peculiarly fitted to tease and an-

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noy even a man of his bulk and his blandness. Shall
a drunkard found dead in a ditch, or a burglar who
has fallen through a skylight, be given the benefit of
the Burial Service? he was asked. The question of
lighted candles was “most difficult”; the wearing of
coloured stoles and the administration of the mixed
chalice taxed him considerably; and finally there was
the Rev. John Purchas, who, dressed in cope, alb,
biretta and stole “cross-wise”, lit candles and extin¬
guished them “for no special reason”; filled a vessel
with black powder and rubbed it into the foreheads of
his congregation; and hung over the Holy Table “a
figure, image, or stuffed skin of a dove, in a flying atti¬
tude”. The Archbishop’s temper, usually so positive
and imperturbable, was gravely ruffled. “Will there
ever come a time when it will be thought a crime to
have striven to keep the Church of England as repre¬
senting the common sense of the Nation?” he asked.
“I suppose it may, but I shall not see it. I have gone
through a good deal, but I do not repent of having
done my best.” If, for a moment, the Archbishop
himself could ask such a question, we must confess to
a state of complete bewilderment. What has become
of our superlatively good man? He is harassed and
cumbered; spends his time settling questions about
stuffed pigeons and coloured petticoats; writes over
eighty letters before breakfast sometimes; scarcely has
time to run over to Paris and buy his daughter a bon¬
net; and in the end has to ask himself whether one of
these days his conduct will not be considered a crime.

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Was it a crime? And if so, was it his fault? Did
he not start out in the belief that Christianity had
something to do with renunciation and was not en¬
tirely a matter of common sense? If honours and
obligations, pomps and possessions, accumulated and
encrusted him, how, being an Archbishop, could he re¬
fuse to accept them ? Princesses must have their soap ;
palaces must have their furniture; children must have
their cows. And, pathetic though it seems, he never
completely lost his interest in science. He wore a pe¬
dometer ; he was one of the first to use a camera ; he be¬
lieved in the future of the typewriter; and in his last
years he tried to mend a broken clock. He was a de¬
lightful father too; he wrote witty, terse, sensible
letters ; his good stories were much to the point ; and he
died in harness. Certainly he was a very able man, but
if we insist upon goodness — is it easy, is it possible, for
a good man to be an Archbishop ?

[286]

The Patron and the Crocus

Young men and women beginning to write are gen¬
erally given the plausible but utterly impracticable
advice to write what they have to write as shortly as
possible, as clearly as possible, and without other
thought in their minds except to say exactly what is in
them. Nobody ever adds on these occasions the one
thing needful: “And be sure you choose your patron
wisely”, though that is the gist of the whole matter.
For a book is always written for somebody to read, and,
since the patron is not merely the paymaster, but also
in a very subtle and insidious way the instigator and
inspirer of what is written, it is of the utmost impor¬
tance that he should be a desirable man.

But who, then, is the desirable man — the patron
who will cajole the best out of the writer’s brain and
bring to birth the most varied and vigorous progeny
of which he is capable? Different ages have answered
the question differently. The Elizabethans, to speak
roughly, chose the aristocracy to write for and the play¬
house public. The eighteenth-century patron was a
combination of coffee-house wit and Grub Street book¬
seller. In the nineteenth century the great writers
wrote for the half-crown magazines and the leisured
classes. And looking back and applauding the splen¬
did results of these different alliances, it all seems en¬
viably simple, and plain as a pikestaff compared with

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THE PATRON AND THE CROCUS

our own predicament — for whom should we write1?
For the present supply of patrons is of unexampled and
bewildering variety. There is the daily Press, the
weekly Press, the monthly Press; the English public
and the American public; the best-seller public and the
worst-seller public; the high-brow public and the red-
blood public; all now organised self-conscious entities
capable through their various mouthpieces of making
their needs known and their approval or displeasure
felt. Thus the writer who has been moved by the
sight of the first crocus in Kensington Gardens has,
before he sets pen to paper, to choose from a crowd of
competitors the particular patron who suits him best.
It is futile to say, “Dismiss them all ; think only of your
crocus”, because writing is a method of communica¬
tion; and the crocus is an imperfect crocus until it has
been shared. The first man or the last may write for
himself alone, but he is an exception and an unenviable
one at that, and the gulls are welcome to his works if
the gulls can read them.

Granted, then, that every writer has some public or
other at the end of his pen, the high-minded will say
that it should be a submissive public, accepting obe¬
diently whatever he likes to give it. Plausible as the
theory sounds, great risks are attached to it. For in
that case the writer remains conscious of his public, yet
is superior to it — an uncomfortable and unfortunate
combination, as the works of Samuel Butler, George
Meredith, and Henry James may be taken to prove.
Each despised the public; each desired a public; each

[288]

THE PATRON AND THE CROCUS

failed to attain a public; and each wreaked his failure
upon the public by a succession, gradually increasing
in intensity, of angularities, obscurities, and affecta¬
tions which no writer whose patron was his equal and
friend would have thought it necessary to inflict.
Their crocuses in consequence are tortured plants, beau¬
tiful and bright, but with something wry-necked about
them, malformed, shrivelled on the one side, overblown
on the other. A touch of the sun would have done
them a world of good. Shall we then rush to the oppo¬
site extreme and accept (if in fancy alone) the flatter¬
ing proposals which the editors of the Times and the
Daily News may be supposed to make us — “Twenty
pounds down for your crocus in precisely fifteen hun¬
dred words, which shall blossom upon every breakfast
table from John o’ Groats to the Land’s End before
nine o’clock to-morrow morning with the writer’s name
attached” ?

But will one crocus be enough, and must it not be
a very brilliant yellow to shine so far, to cost so much,
and to have one’s name attached to it? The Press is
undoubtedly a great multiplier of crocuses. But if we
look at some of these plants, we shall find that they
are only very distantly related to the original little yel¬
low or purple flower which pokes up through the grass
in Kensington Gardens about this time of year. The
newspaper crocus is amazing but still a very different
plant. It fills precisely the space allotted to it. It
radiates a golden glow. It is genial, affable, warm¬
hearted. It is beautifully finished, too, for let nobody

[289]

THE PATRON AND THE CROCUS

think that the art of “our dramatic critic” of the Times
or of Mr. Lynd of the Daily News is an easy one. It
is no despicable feat to start a million brains running
at nine o’clock in the morning, to give two million eyes
something bright and brisk and amusing to look at.
But the night comes and these flowers fade. So little
bits of glass lose their lustre if you take them out of
the sea; great prima donnas howl like hyenas if you
shut them up in telephone boxes; and the most bril¬
liant of articles when removed from its element is dust
and sand and the husks of straw. Journalism em¬
balmed in a book is unreadable.

The patron we want, then, is one who will help us
to preserve our flowers from decay. But as his quali¬
ties change from age to age, and it needs considerable
integrity and conviction not to be dazzled by the pre¬
tensions or bamboozled by the persuasions of the com¬
peting crowd, this business of patron-finding is one of
the tests and trials of authorship. To know whom to
write for is to know how to write. Some of the mod¬
ern patron’s qualities are, however, fairly plain. The
writer will require at this moment, it is obvious, a
patron with the book-reading habit rather than the
play-going habit. Nowadays, too, he must be in¬
structed in the literature of other times and races. But
there are other qualities which our special weaknesses
and tendencies demand in him. There is the question
of indecency, for instance, which plagues us and puz¬
zles us much more than it did the Elizabethans. The
twentieth-century patron must be immune from shock.

[290]

THE PATRON AND THE CROCUS

He must distinguish infallibly between the little clod
of manure which sticks to the crocus of necessity, and
that which is plastered to it out of bravado. He jnust
be a judge, too, of those social influences which inevi¬
tably play so large a part in modern literature, and able
to say which matures and fortifies, which inhibits and
makes sterile. Further, there is emotion for him to
pronounce on, and in no department can he do more
useful work than in bracing a writer against sentimen¬
tality on the one hand and a craven fear of expressing
his feeling on the other. It is worse, he will say, and
perhaps more common, to be afraid of feeling than to
feel too much. He will add, perhaps, something about
language, and point out how many words Shakespeare
used and how much grammar Shakespeare violated,
while we, though we keep our fingers so demurely to
the black notes on the piano, have not appreciably im¬
proved upon Antony and Cleopatra. And if you can
forget your sex altogether, he will say, so much the
better ; a writer has none. . But all this is by the way —
elementary and disputable. The patron’s prime qual¬
ity is something different, only to be expressed perhaps
by the use of that convenient word which cloaks so
much — atmosphere. It is necessary that the patron
should shed and envelop the crocus in an atmosphere
which makes it appear a plant of the very highest im¬
portance, so that to misrepresent it is the one outrage
not to be forgiven this side of the grave. He must
make us feel that a single crocus, if it be a real crocus,
is enough for him; that he does not want to be lec-

[291]

THE PATRON AND THE CROCUS

tured, elevated, instructed, or improved; that he is
sorry that he bullied Carlyle into vociferation, Tenny¬
son into idyllics, and Ruskin into insanity; that he is
now ready to efface himself or assert himself as his
writers require; that he is bound to them by a more
than maternal tie ; that they are twins indeed, one dying
if the other dies, one flourishing if the other flourishes;
that the fate of literature depends upon their happy
alliance — all of which proves, as we began by saying,
that the choice of a patron is of the highest importance.
But how to choose rightly? How to write well?
Those are the questions.

[292]

The Modern Essay

As Mr. Rhys truly says, it is unnecessary to go pro¬
foundly into the history and origin of the essay —
whether it derives from Socrates or Siranney the Per¬
sian — since, like all living things, its present is more
important than its past. Moreover, the family is
widely spread; and while some of its representatives
have risen in the world and wear their coronets with
the best, others pick up a precarious living in the gut¬
ter near Fleet Street. The form, too, admits variety.
The essay can be short or long, serious or trifling, about
God and Spinoza, or about turtles and Cheapside.
But as we turn over the pages of these five little vol¬
umes,1 containing essays written between 1870 and
1920, certain principles appear to control the chaos,
and we detect in the short period under review some¬
thing like the progress of history.

Of all forms of literature, however, the essay is the
one which least calls for the use of long words. The
principle which controls it is simply that it should give
pleasure; the desire which impels us when we take it
from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Every¬
thing in an essay must be subdued to that end. It
should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we
should only wake, refreshed, with its last. In the in¬
terval we may pass through the most various experi-
1 Modern English Essays, edited by Ernest Rhys, 5 vols. (Dent).

[293]

THE MODERN ESSAY

ences of amusement, surprise, interest, indignation;
we may soar to the heights of fantasy with Lamb or
plunge to the depths of wisdom with Bacon, but we
must never be roused. The essay must lap us about
and draw its curtain across the world.

So great a feat is seldom accomplished, though the
fault may well be as much on the reader’s side as on
the writer’s. Habit and lethargy have dulled his pal¬
ate. A novel has a story, a poem rhyme ; but what art
can the essayist use in these short lengths of prose to
sting us wide awake and fix us in a trance which is not
sleep but rather an intensification of life — a basking,
with every faculty alert, in the sun of pleasure? He
must know — that is the first essential — how to write.
His learning may be as profound as Mark Pattison’s,
but in an essay it must be so fused by the magic of
writing that not a fact juts out, not a dogma tears the
surface of the texture. Macaulay in one way, Froude
in another, did this superbly over and over again.
They have blown more knowledge into us in the course
of one essay than the innumerable chapters of a hun¬
dred text-books. But when Mark Pattison has to tell
us, in the space of thirty-five little pages, about Mon¬
taigne, we feel that he had not previously assimilated
M. Grim. M. Grim was a gentleman who once wrote
a bad book. M. Grim and his book should have been
embalmed for our perpetual delight in amber. But the
process is fatiguing; it requires more time and perhaps
more temper than Pattison had at his command. He

[294]

THE MODERN ESSAY

served M. Grim up raw, and he remains a crude berry
among the cook meats, upon which our teeth must
grate for ever. Something of the sort applies to Mat¬
thew Arnold and a certain translator of Spinoza. Lit¬
eral truth-telling and finding fault with a culprit for
his good are out of place in an essay, where everything
should be for our good and rather for eternity than
for the March number of the Fortnightly Review. But
if the voice of the scold should never be heard in this
narrow plot, there is another voice which is as a plague
of locusts — the voice of a man stumbling drowsily
among loose words, clutching aimlessly at vague ideas,
the voice, for example, of Mr. Hutton in the following
passage :

Add to this that his married life was very brief, only seven
years and a half, being unexpectedly cut short, and that his
passionate reverence for his wife’s memory and genius — in his
own words, “a religion” — was one which, as he must have
been perfectly sensible, he could not make to appear otherwise
than extravagant, not to say an hallucination, in the eyes of
the rest of mankind, and yet that he was possessed by an
irresistible yearning to attempt to embody it in all the tender
and enthusiastic hyperbole of which it is so pathetic to find a
man who gained his fame by his “dry-light” a master, and it
is impossible not to feel that the human incidents in Mr.
Mill’s career are very sad.

A book could take that blow, but it sinks an essay.
A biography in two volumes is indeed the proper de¬
positary; for there, where the licence is so much wider,
and hints and glimpses of outside things make part of

095]

THE MODERN ESSAY

the feast (we refer to the old type of Victorian vol¬
ume), these yawns and stretches hardly matter, and
have indeed some positive value of their own. But
that value, which is contributed by the reader, perhaps
illicitly, in his desire to get as much into the book
from all possible sources as he can, must be ruled out
here.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in
an essay. Somehow or other, by dint of labour or
bounty of nature, or both combined, the essay must be
pure — pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from
dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.
Of all writers in the first volume, Waiter Pater best
achieves this arduous task, because before setting out
to write his essay (“Notes on Leonardo da Vinci”) he
has somehow contrived to get his material fused. He
is a learned man, but it is not knowledge of Leonardo
that remains with us, but a vision, such as we get in
a good novel where everything contributes to bring
the writer’s conception as a whole before us. Only
here, in the essay, where the bounds are so strict and
facts have to be used in their nakedness, the true writer
like Walter Pater makes these limitations yield their
own quality. Truth will give it authority; from its
narrow limits he will get shape and intensity; and
then there is no more fitting place for some of those
ornaments which the old writers loved and we, by call¬
ing them ornaments, presumably despise. Nowadays
nobody would have the courage to embark on the once
famous description of Leonardo’s lady who has

[296]

THE MODERN ESSAY

learned the secrets of the grave ; and has been a diver in deep
seas and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for
strange webs with Eastern merchants ; and, as Leda, was the
mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of
Mary . . .

The passage is too thumb-marked to slip naturally into
the context. But when we come unexpectedly upon
‘‘the smiling of women and the motion of great wa¬
ters”, or upon “full of the refinement of the dead, in
sad, earth-coloured raiment, set with pale stones”, we
suddenly remember that we have ears and we have eyes,
and that the English language fills a long array of
stout volumes with innumerable words, many of which
are of more than one syllable. The only living Eng¬
lishman who ever looks into these volumes is, of course,
a gentleman of Polish extraction. But doubtless our
abstention saves us much gush, much rhetoric, much
high-stepping and cloud-prancing, and for the sake
of the prevailing sobriety and hard-headedness we
should be willing to barter the splendour of Sir Thomas
Browne and the vigour of Swift.

Yet, if the essay admits more properly than biog¬
raphy or fiction of sudden boldness and metaphor, and
can be polished till every atom of its surface shines,
there are dangers in that too. We are soon in sight of
ornament. Soon the current, which is the life-blood of
literature, runs slow; and instead of sparkling and
flashing or moving with a quieter impulse which has a
deeper excitement, words coagulate together in frozen
sprays which, like the grapes on a Christmas-tree, glit-

[29 7]

THE MODERN ESSAY

ter for a single night, but are dusty and garish the
day after. The temptation to decorate is great where
the theme may be of the slightest. What is there to
interest another in the fact that one has enjoyed a
walking tour, or has amused oneself by rambling down
Cheapside and looking at the turtles in Mr. Sweeting’s
shop window? Stevenson and Samuel Butler chose
very different methods of exciting our interest in these
domestic themes. Stevenson, of course, trimmed and
polished and set out his matter in the traditional
eighteenth-century form. It is admirably done, but
we cannot help feeling anxious, as the essay proceeds,
lest the material may give out under the craftsman’s
fingers. The ingot is so small, the manipulation so in¬
cessant. And perhaps that is why the peroration —

To sit still and contemplate — to remember the faces of
women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men
without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy
and yet content to remain where and what you are —

has the sort of insubstantiality which suggests that by
the time he got to the end he had left himself nothing
solid to work with. Butler adopted the very opposite
method. Think your own thoughts, he seems to say,
and speak them as plainly as you can. These turtles
in the shop window which appear to leak out of their
shells through heads and feet suggest a fatal faithful¬
ness to a fixed idea. And so, striding unconcernedly
from one idea to the next, we traverse a large stretch
of ground; observe that a wound in the solicitor is a

[298]

THE MODERN ESSAY

very serious thing; that Mary Queen of Scots wears
surgical boots and is subject to fits near the Horse Shoe
in Tottenham Court Road; take it for granted that no
one really cares about iEschylus; and so, with many
amusing anecdotes and some profound reflections, reach
the peroration, which is that, as he had been told not to
see more in Cheapside than he could get into twelve
pages of the Universal Review, he had better stop.
And yet obviously Butler is at least as careful of our
pleasure as Stevenson; and to write like oneself and
call it not writing is a much harder exercise in style
than to write like Addison and call it writing well.

But, however much they differ individually, the
Victorian essayists yet had something in common.
They wrote at greater length than is now usual, and
they wrote for a public which had not only time to sit
down to its magazine seriously, but a high, if pecul¬
iarly Victorian, standard of culture by which to judge
it. It was worth while to speak out upon serious mat¬
ters in an essay ; and there was nothing absurd in writ¬
ing as well as one possibly could when, in a month
or two, the same public which had welcomed the essay
in a magazine would carefully read it once more in a
book. But a change came from a small audience of
cultivated people to a larger audience of people who
were not quite so cultivated. The change was not alto¬
gether for the worse. In volume iii. we find Mr. Birrell
and Mr. Beerbohm. It might even be said that there
was a reversion to the classic type, and that the essay
by losing its size and something of its sonority was

[299]

THE MODERN ESSAY

approaching more nearly the essay of Addison and
Lamb. At any rate, there is a great gulf between Mr.
Birrell on Carlyle and the essay which one may sup¬
pose that Carlyle would have written upon Mr. Birrell.
There is little similarity between A Cloud of Pinafores ,
by Max Beerbohm, and A Cynic's Apology , by Leslie
Stephen. But the essay is alive; there is no reason
to despair. As the conditions change so the essayist,
most sensitive of all plants to public opinion, adapts
himself, and if he is good makes the best of the change,
and if he is bad the worst. Mr. Birrell is certainly
good; and so we find that, though he has dropped a
considerable amount of weight, his attack is much more
direct and his movement more supple. But what did
Mr. Beerbohm give to the essay and what did he take
from it*? That is a much more complicated question,
for here we have an essayist who has concentrated on
the work and is without doubt the prince of his pro¬
fession.

What Mr. Beerbohm gave was, of course, himself.
This presence, which has haunted the essay fitfully from
the time of Montaigne, had been in exile since the
death of Charles Lamb. Matthew Arnold was never
to his readers Matt, nor Walter Pater affectionately
abbreviated in a thousand homes to Wat. They gave
us much, but that they did not give. Thus, some time
in the nineties, it must have surprised readers accus¬
tomed to exhortation, information, and denunciation
to find themselves familiarly addressed by a voice
which seemed to belong to a man no larger than them-

[300]

THE MODERN ESSAY

selves. He was affected by private joys and sorrows,
and had no gospel to preach and no learning to im¬
part. He was himself, simply and directly, and him¬
self he has remained. Once again we have an essayist
capable of using the essayist’s most proper but most
dangerous and delicate tool. He has brought per¬
sonality into literature, not unconsciously and im¬
purely, but so consciously and purely that we do not
know whether there is any relation between Max the
essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know
that the spirit of personality permeates every word
that he writes. The triumph is the triumph of style.
For it is only by knowing how to write that you can
make use in literature of your self; that self which,
while it is essential to literature, is also its most dan¬
gerous antagonist. Never to be yourself and yet al¬
ways — that is the problem. Some of the essayists in
Mr. Rhys’ collection, to be frank, have not altogether
succeeded in solving it. We are nauseated by the
sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eter¬
nity of print. As talk, no doubt, it was charming, and
certainly the writer is a good fellow to meet over a
bottle of beer. But literature is stern ; it is no use be¬
ing charming, virtuous, or even learned and brilliant
into the bargain, unless, she seems to reiterate, you
fulfil her first condition — to know how to write.

This art is possessed to perfection by Mr. Beerbohm.
But he has not searched the dictionary for polysylla¬
bles. He has not moulded firm periods or seduced our
ears with intricate cadences and strange melodies.

[301]

THE MODERN ESSAY

Some of his companions — Henley and Stevenson, for
example — are momentarily more impressive. But A
Cloud of Pinafores had in it that indescribable in¬
equality, stir, and final expressiveness which belong
to life and to life alone. You have not finished with
it because you have read it, any more than friendship
is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and
alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if
they are alive ; we find ourselves wanting to meet them
again; we find them altered. So we look back upon
essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that,
come September or May, we shall sit down with them
and talk. Yet it is true that the essayist is the most
sensitive of all writers to public opinion. The draw¬
ing-room is the place where a great deal of reading is
done nowadays, and the essays of Mr. Beerbohm lie,
with an exquisite appreciation of all that the position
exacts, upon the drawing-room table. There is no gin
about; no strong tobacco; no puns, drunkenness, or in¬
sanity. Ladies and gentlemen talk together, and some
things, of course, are not said.

But if it would be foolish to attempt to confine Mr.
Beerbohm to one room, it would be still more foolish,
unhappily, to make him, the artist, the man who gives
us only his best, the representative of our age. There
are no essays by Mr. Beerbohm in the fourth or fifth
volumes of the present collection. His age seems al¬
ready a little distant, and the drawing-room table, as
it recedes, begins to look rather like an altar where,
once upon a time, people deposited offerings — fruit

[302]

THE MODERN ESSAY

from their own orchards, gifts carved with their own
hands. Now once more the conditions have changed.
The public needs essays as much as ever, and perhaps
even more. The demand for the light middle not ex¬
ceeding fifteen hundred words, or in special cases seven¬
teen hundred and fifty, much exceeds the supply.
Where Lamb wrote one essay and Max perhaps
writes two, Mr. Belloc at a rough computation pro¬
duces three hundred and sixty-five. They are very
short, it is true. Yet with what dexterity the practised
essayist will utilise his space — beginning as close to the
top of the sheet as possible, judging precisely how far
to go, when to turn, and how, without sacrificing a
hair’s-breadth of paper, to wheel about and alight
accurately upon the last word his editor allows! As
a feat of skill it is well worth watching. But the per¬
sonality upon which Mr. Belloc, like Mr. Beerbohm,
depends suffers in the process. It comes to us not
with the natural richness of the speaking voice, but
strained and thin and full of mannerisms and affecta¬
tions, like the voice of a man shouting through a mega¬
phone to a crowd on a windy day. “Little friends,
my readers,” he says in the essay called “An Unknown
Country”, and he goes on to tell us how —

There was a shepherd the other day at Findon Fair who
had come from the east by Lewes with sheep, and who had
in his eyes that reminiscence of horizons which makes the eyes
of shepherds and of mountaineers different from the eyes of
other men. ... I went with him to hear what he had to say,
for shepherds talk quite differently from other men.

[303]

THE MODERN ESSAY

Happily this shepherd had little to say, even under
the stimulus of the inevitable mug of beer, about the
Unknown Country, for the only remark that he did
make proves him either a minor poet, unfit for the care
of sheep, or Mr. Belloc himself masquerading with a
fountain pen. That is the penalty which the habitual
essayist must now be prepared to face. He must mas¬
querade. He cannot afford the time either to be him¬
self or to be other people. He must skim the surface
of thought and dilute the strength of personality. He
must give us a worn weekly halfpenny instead of a
solid sovereign once a year.

But it is not Mr. Belloc only who has suffered from
the prevailing conditions. The essays which bring the
collection to the year 1920 may not be the best of
their authors’ work, but, if we except writers like Mr.
Conrad and Mr. Hudson, who have strayed into essay
writing accidentally, and concentrate upon those who
write essays habitually, we shall find them a good deal
affected by the change in their circumstances. To
write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write
for busy people catching trains in the morning or for
tired people coming home in the evening, is a heart¬
breaking task for men who know good writing from
bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm’s
way anything precious that might be damaged by con¬
tact with the public, or anything sharp that might irri¬
tate its skin. And so, if one reads Mr. Lucas, Mr.
Lynd, or Mr. Squire in the bulk, one feels that a com¬
mon greyness silvers everything. They are as far re-

[304]

THE MODERN ESSAY

moved from the extravagant beauty of Walter Pater as
they are from the intemperate candour of Leslie Ste¬
phen. Beauty and courage are dangerous spirits to bat¬
tle in a column and a half ; and thought, like a brown
paper parcel in a waistcoat pocket, has a way of spoil¬
ing the symmetry of an article. It is a kind, tired,
apathetic world for which they write, and the marvel is
that they never cease to attempt, at least, to write well.

But there is no need to pity Mr. Clutton Brock for
this change in the essayist’s conditions. He has clearly
made the best of his circumstances and not the worst.
One hesitates even to say that he has had to make any
conscious effort in the matter, so naturally has he
effected the transition from the private essayist to the
public, from the drawing-room to the Albert Hall.
Paradoxically enough, the shrinkage in size has brought
about a corresponding expansion of individuality.
We have no longer the “I” of Max and of Lamb, but
the “we” of public bodies and other sublime person¬
ages. It is “we” who go to hear the Magic Flute ; “we”
who ought to profit by it; “we”, in some mysterious
way, who, in our corporate capacity, once upon a time
actually wrote it. For music and literature and art
must submit to the same generalisation or they will
not carry to the farthest recesses of the Albert Hall.
That the voice of Mr. Clutton Brock, so sincere and so
disinterested, carries such a distance and reaches so
many without pandering to the weakness of the mass
or its passions must be a matter of legitimate satisfac¬
tion to us all. But while “we” are gratified, “I”, that

[305]

THE MODERN ESSAY

unruly partner in the human fellowship, is reduced to
despair. “I” must always think things for himself,
and feel things for himself. To share them in a diluted
form with the majority of well-educated and well-in¬
tentioned men and women is for him sheer agony; and
while the rest of us listen intently and profit pro¬
foundly, “I” slips off to the woods and the fields and
rejoices in a single blade of grass or a solitary potato.

In the fifth volume of modern essays, it seems, we
have got some way from pleasure and the art of writ¬
ing. But in justice to the essayists of 1920 we must
be sure that we are not praising the famous because
they have been praised already and the dead because
we shall never meet them wearing spats in Piccadilly.
We must know what we mean when we say that they
can write and give us pleasure. We must compare
them; we must bring out the quality. We must point
to this and say it is good because it is exact, truthful,
and imaginative:

Nay, retire men cannot when they would ; neither will they,
when it were Reason; but are impatient of Privateness, even
in age and sickness, which require the shadow: like old Towns¬
men: that will still be sitting at their street door, though
thereby they offer Age to Scorn . . .

and to this, and say it is bad because it is loose, plausi¬
ble, and commonplace:

With courteous and precise cynicism on his lips, he thought
of quiet virginal chambers, of waters singing under the moon,
of terraces where taintless music sobbed into the open night,

[306]

THE MODERN ESSAY

of pure maternal mistresses with protecting arms and vigilant
eyes, of fields slumbering in the sunlight, of leagues of ocean
heaving under warm tremulous heavens, of hot ports, gorgeous
and perfumed. . . .

It goes on, but already we are bemused with sound
and neither feel nor hear. The comparison makes us
suspect that the art of writing has for backbone some
fierce attachment to an idea. It is on the back of an
idea, something believed in with conviction or seen
with precision and thus compelling words to its shape,
that the diverse company which included Lamb and
Bacon, and Mr. Beerbohm and Hudson, and Vernon
Lee and Mr. Conrad, and Leslie Stephen and Butler
and Walter Pater reaches the farther shore. Very
various talents have helped or hindered the passage of
the idea into words. Some scrape through painfully;
others fly with every wind favouring. But Mr. Belloc
and Mr. Lucas and Mr. Lynd and Mr. Squire are not
fiercely attached to anything in itself. They share the
contemporary dilemma — that lack of an obstinate con¬
viction which lifts ephemeral sounds through the misty
sphere of anybody’s language to the land where there is
a perpetual marriage, a perpetual union. Vague as all
definitions are, a good essay must have this permanent
quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us,
but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.

[307]

Joseph Conrad 1

Suddenly, without giving us time to arrange our
thoughts or prepare our phrases, our guest has left us;
and his withdrawal without farewell or ceremony is in
keeping with his mysterious arrival, long years ago, to
take up his lodging in this country. For there was al¬
ways an air of mystery about him. It was partly his
Polish birth, partly his memorable appearance, partly
his preference for living in the depths of the country,
out of ear-shot of gossips, beyond reach of hostesses, so
that for news of him one had to depend upon the evi¬
dence of simple visitors with a habit of ringing door¬
bells who reported of their unknown host that he had
the most perfect manners, the brightest eyes, and spoke
English with a strong foreign accent.

Still, though it is the habit of death to quicken and
focus our memories, there clings to the genius of Con¬
rad something essentially, and not accidentally, diffi¬
cult of approach. His reputation of later years was,
with one obvious exception, undoubtedly the highest
in England; yet he was not popular. He was read
with passionate delight by some ; others he left cold and
lustreless. Among his readers were people of the most
opposite ages and sympathies. Schoolboys of four¬
teen, driving their way through Marryat, Scott, Henty,
and Dickens, swallowed him down with the rest ; while

1 August, 1924.

[309]

JOSEPH CONRAD

the seasoned and the fastidious, who in process of time
have eaten their way to the heart of literature and
there turn over and over a few precious crumbs, set Con¬
rad scrupulously upon their banqueting table. One
source of difficulty and disagreement is, of course, to be
found, where men have at all times found it, in his
beauty. One opens his pages and feels as Helen must
have felt when she looked in her glass and realised that,
do what she would, she could never in any circum¬
stances pass for a plain woman. So Conrad had been
gifted, so he had schooled himself, and such was his
obligation to a strange language wooed characteristi¬
cally for its Latin qualities rather than its Saxon that
it seemed impossible for him to make an ugly or insig¬
nificant movement of the pen. His mistress, his style,
is a little somnolent sometimes in repose. But let
somebody speak to her, and then how magnificently
she bears down upon us, with what colour, triumph,
and majesty! Yet it is arguable that Conrad would
have gained both in credit and in popularity if he had
written what he had to write without this incessant
care for appearances. They block and impede and
distract, his critics say, pointing to those famous pas¬
sages which it is becoming the habit to lift from their
context and exhibit among other cut flowers of English
prose. He was self-conscious and stiff and ornate, they
complain, and the sound of his own voice was dearer
to him than the voice of humanity in its anguish. The
criticism is familiar, and as difficult to refute as the
remarks of deaf people when Figaro is played. They

JOSEPH CONRAD

see the orchestra; far off they hear a dismal scrape of
sound; their own remarks are interrupted, and, very
naturally, they conclude that the ends of life would be
better served if instead of scraping Mozart those fifty
fiddlers broke stones upon the road. That beauty
teaches, that beauty is a disciplinarian, how are we to
convince them, since her teaching is inseparable from
the sound of her voice and to that they are deaf *? But
read Conrad, not in birthday books but in the bulk,
and he must be lost indeed to the meaning of words
who does not hear in that rather stiff and sombre mu¬
sic, with its reserve, its pride, its vast and implacable
integrity, how it is better to be good than bad, how
loyalty is good and honesty and courage, though os¬
tensibly Conrad is concerned merely to show us the
beauty of a night at sea. But it is ill work dragging
such intimations from their element. Dried in our
little saucers, without the magic and mystery of lan¬
guage, they lose their power to excite and goad; they
lose the drastic power which is a constant quality of
Conrad’s prose.

For it was by virtue of something drastic in him,
the qualities of a leader and captain, that Conrad
kept his hold over boys and young people. Until Nos-
tromo was written his characters, as the young were
quick to perceive, were fundamentally simple and
heroic, however subtle the mind and indirect the
method of their creator. They were seafarers, used to
solitude and silence. They were in conflict with Na¬
ture, but at peace with man. Nature was their an-

[3”]

JOSEPH CONRAD

tagonist; she it was who drew forth honour, mag¬
nanimity, loyalty, the qualities proper to man ; she who
in sheltered bays reared to womanhood beautiful girls
unfathomable and austere. Above all, it was Nature
who turned out such gnarled and tested characters as
Captain Whalley and old Singleton, obscure but glori¬
ous in their obscurity, who were to Conrad the pick of
our race, the men whose praises he was never tired of
celebrating:

They had been strong as those are strong who know neither
doubts nor hopes. They had been impatient and enduring,
turbulent and devoted, unruly and faithful. Well-meaning
people had tried to represent these men as whining over every
mouthful of their food, as going about their work in fear of
their lives. But in truth they had been men who knew toil,
privation, violence, debauchery — but knew not fear, and had
no desire of spite in their hearts. Men hard to manage, but
easy to inspire; voiceless men — but men enough to scorn in
their hearts the sentimental voices that bewailed the hardness
of their fate. It was a fate unique and their own ; the capacity
to bear it appeared to them the privilege of the chosen ! Their
generation lived inarticulate and indispensable, without know¬
ing the sweetness of affections or the refuge of a home — and
died free from the dark menace of a narrow grave. They
were the everlasting children of the mysterious sea.

Such were the characters of the early books — Lord
Jim, Typhoon , The Nigger of the “ Narcissus ”, Youth ;
and these books, in spite of the changes and fashions,
are surely secure of their place among our classics. But
they reach this height by means of qualities which the
simple story of adventure, as Marryat told it, or Feni-

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JOSEPH CONRAD

more Cooper, has no claim to possess. For it is clear
that to admire and celebrate such men and such deeds,
romantically, whole-heartedly and with the fervour of
a lover, one must be possessed of the double vision;
one must be at once inside and out. To praise their
silence one must possess a voice. To appreciate their
endurance one must be sensitive to fatigue. One must
be able to live on equal terms with the Whalleys and
the Singletons and yet hide from their suspicious eyes
the very qualities which enable one to understand
them. Conrad alone was able to live that double life,
for Conrad was compound of two men; together with
the sea captain dwelt that subtle, refined, and fastidi¬
ous analyst whom he called Marlow. “A most dis¬
creet, understanding man”, he said of Marlow.

Marlow was one of those bom observers who are
happiest in retirement. Marlow liked nothing better
than to sit on deck, in some obscure creek of the
Thames, smoking and recollecting; smoking and specu¬
lating; sending after his smoke beautiful rings of words
until all the summer’s night became a little clouded
with tobacco smoke. Marlow, too, had a profound
respect for the men with whom he had sailed; but he
saw the humour of them. He nosed out and described
in masterly fashion those livid creatures who prey suc¬
cessfully upon the clumsy veterans. He had a flair
for human deformity; his humour was sardonic. Nor
did Marlow live entirely wreathed in the smoke of his
own cigars. He had a habit of opening his eyes sud¬
denly and looking — at a rubbish heap, at a port, at a

[313]

JOSEPH CONRAD

shop counter — and then complete in its burning ring
of light that thing is flashed bright upon the mysteri¬
ous background. Introspective and analytical, Mar¬
low was aware of this peculiarity. He said the power
came to him suddenly. He might, for instance, over¬
hear a French officer murmur “Mon Dieu, how the
time passes!”

Nothing [he comments] could have been more common¬
place than this remark; but its utterance coincided for me
with a moment of vision. It’s extraordinary how we go
through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dor¬
mant thoughts. . . . Nevertheless, there can be but few of us
who had never known one of these rare moments of awaken¬
ing, when we see, hear, understand, ever so much — everything
— in a flash, before we fall back again into our agreeable som¬
nolence. I raised my eyes when he spoke, and I saw him as
though I had never seen him before.

Picture after picture he painted thus upon that
dark background; ships first and foremost, ships at
anchor, ships flying before the storm, ships in harbour ;
he painted sunsets and dawns; he painted the night;
he painted the sea in every aspect; he painted the
gaudy brilliancy of Eastern ports, and men and
women, their houses and their attitudes. He was an
accurate and unflinching observer, schooled to that
“absolute loyalty towards his feelings and sensations”,
which, Conrad wrote, “an author should keep hold of in
his most exalted moments of creation”. And very
quietly and compassionately Marlow sometimes lets
fall a few words of epitaph which remind us, with

[314]

JOSEPH CONRAD

all that beauty and brilliancy before our eyes, of the
darkness of the background.

Thus a rough-and-ready distinction would make us
say that it is Marlow who comments, Conrad who
creates. It would lead us, aware that we are on danger¬
ous ground, to account for that change which, Conrad
tells us, took place when he had finished the last story
in the Typhoon volume — “a subtle change in the na¬
ture of the inspiration” — by some alteration in the re¬
lationship of the two old friends. “. . . it seemed
somehow that there was nothing more in the world
to write about.” It was Conrad, letais suppose, Con¬
rad the creator, who said that, looking back with
sorrowful satisfaction upon the stories he had told;
feeling as he well might that he could never better
the storm in The Nigger of the Narcissus ”, or render
more faithful tribute to the qualities of British sea¬
men than he had done already in Youth and Lord Jim.
It was then that Marlow, the commentator, reminded
him how, in the course of nature, one must grow old,
sit smoking on deck, and give up seafaring. But, he
reminded him, those strenuous years had deposited
their memories; and he even went so far perhaps as
to hint that, though the last word might have been
said about Captain Whalley and his relation to the
universe, there remained on shore a number of men
and women whose relationships, though of a more
personal kind, might be worth looking into. If we
further suppose that there was a volume of Henry
James on board and that Marlow gave his friend the

[315]

JOSEPH CONRAD

book to take to bed with him, we may seek support
in the fact that it was in 1905 that Conrad wrote a
very fine essay upon that master.

For some years, then, it was Marlow who was the
dominant partner. Nostromo , Chance , The Arrow of
Gold represent that stage of the alliance which some
will continue to find the richest of all. The human
heart is more intricate than the forest, they will say;
it has its storms ; it has its creatures- of the night ; and
if as novelist you wish to test man in all his relation¬
ships, the proper antagonist is man; his ordeal is in
society, not solitude. For them there will always be
a peculiar fascination in the books where the light of
those brilliant eyes falls not only upon the waste of
waters but upon the heart in its perplexity. But it
must be admitted that, if Marlow thus advised Con¬
rad to shift his angle of vision, the advice was bold.
For the vision of a novelist is both complex and
specialised ; complex, because behind his characters and
apart from them must stand something stable to which
he relates them; specialised because since he is a single
person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which
he can believe with conviction are strictly limited. So
delicate a balance is easily disturbed. After the middle
period Conrad never again was able to bring his figures
into perfect relation with their background. He never
believed in his later and more highly sophisticated
characters as he had believed in his early seamen.
When he had to indicate their relation to that other
unseen world of novelists, the world of values and

[316]

JOSEPH CONRAD

convictions, he was far less sure what those values were.
Then, over and over again, a single phrase, “He steered
with care”, coming at the end of a storm, carried in
it a whole morality. But in this more crowded and
complicated world such terse phrases became less and
less appropriate. Complex men and women of many
interests and relations would not submit to so summary
a judgement; or, if they did, much that was important
in them escaped the verdict. And yet it was very
necessary to Conrad’s genius, with its luxuriant and
romantic power, to have some law by which its crea¬
tions could be tried. Essentially — such remained his
creed — this world of civilised and self-conscious peo¬
ple is based upon “a few very simple ideas” ; but where,
in the world of thoughts and personal relations, are
we to find them? There are no masts in drawing¬
rooms; the typhoon does not test the worth of poli¬
ticians and business men. Seeking and not finding
such supports, the world of Conrad’s later period has
about it an involuntary obscurity, an inconclusiveness,
almost a disillusionment which baffles and fatigues.
We lay hold in the dusk only of the old nobilities and
sonorities : fidelity, compassion, honour, service — beau¬
tiful always, but now a little wearily reiterated, as if
times had changed. Perhaps it was Marlow who was
at fault. His habit of mind was a trifle sedentary.
He had sat upon deck too long; splendid in soliloquy,
he was less apt in the give and take of conversation;
and those “moments of vision” flashing and fading,
do not serve as well as steady lamplight to illumine

[317]

JOSEPH CONRAD

the ripple of life and its long, gradual years. Above
all, perhaps, he did not take into account how, if Con¬
rad was to create, it was essential first that he should
believe.

Therefore, though we shall make expeditions into
the later books and bring back wonderful trophies,
large tracts of them will remain by most of us un¬
trodden. It is the earlier books — Youth , Lord Jim,
Typhoon , The Nigger of the Narcissus ” — that we
shall read in their entirety. For when the question is
asked, what of Conrad will survive and where in the
ranks of novelists we are to place him, these books,
with their air of telling us something very old and
perfectly true, which had lain hidden but is now
revealed, will come to mind and make such questions
and comparisons seem a little futile. Complete and
still, very chaste and very beautiful, they rise in the
memory as, on these hot summer nights, in their slow
and stately way first one star comes out and then
another.

How It Strikes a
Contemporary

In the first place a contemporary can scarcely fail
to be struck by the fact that two critics at the same
table at the same moment will pronounce completely
different opinions about the same book. Here, on the
right, it is declared a masterpiece of English prose;
on the left, simultaneously, a mere mass of waste-
paper which, if the fire could survive it, should be
thrown upon the flames. Yet both critics are in
agreement about Milton and about Keats. They dis¬
play an exquisite sensibility and have undoubtedly a
genuine enthusiasm. It is only when they discuss the
work of contemporary writers that they inevitably
come to blows. The book in question, which is at once
a lasting contribution to English literature and a mere
farrago of pretentious mediocrity, was published about
two months ago. That is the explanation ; that is why
they differ.

The explanation is a strange one. It is equally
disconcerting to the reader who wishes to take his
bearings in the chaos of contemporary literature and to
the writer who has a natural desire to know whether his
own work, produced with infinite pains and in almost
utter darkness, is likely to burn for ever among the
fixed luminaries of English letters or, on the contrary,

[319]

HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY

to put out the fire. But if we identify ourselves with
the reader and explore his dilemma first, our bewilder¬
ment is short-lived enough. The same thing has hap¬
pened so often before. We have heard the doctors dis¬
agreeing about the new and agreeing about the old
twice a year on the average, in spring and autumn, ever
since Robert Elsmere, or was it Stephen Phillips, some¬
how pervaded the atmosphere, and there was the same
disagreement among grown-up people about them.
It would be much more marvellous, and indeed much
more upsetting, if, for a wonder, both gentlemen
agreed, pronounced Blank’s book an undoubted mas¬
terpiece, and thus faced us with the necessity of de¬
ciding whether we should back their judgement to the
extent of ten and sixpence. Both are critics of reputa¬
tion; the opinions tumbled out so spontaneously here
will be starched and stiffened into columns of sober
prose which will uphold the dignity of letters in Eng¬
land and America.

It must be some innate cynicism, then, some un¬
generous distrust of contemporary genius, which de¬
termines us automatically as the talk goes on that,
were they to agree — which they show no signs of doing
— half a guinea is altogether too large a sum to squan¬
der upon contemporary enthusiasms, and the case will
be met quite adequately by a card to the library. Still
the question remains, and let us put it boldly to the
critics themselves. Is there no guidance nowadays for
a reader who yields to none in reverence for the dead,
but is tormented by the suspicion that reverence for the

[320]

HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY

dead is vitally connected with understanding of the
living*? After a rapid survey both critics are agreed
that there is unfortunately no such person. For what
is their own judgement worth where new books are
concerned*? Certainly not ten and sixpence. And
from the stores of their experience they proceed to
bring forth terrible examples of past blunders; crimes
of criticism which, if they had been committed against
the dead and not against the living, would have lost
them their jobs and imperilled their reputations. The
only advice they can offer is to respect one’s own in¬
stincts, to follow them fearlessly and, rather than sub¬
mit them to the control of any critic or reviewer alive,
to check them by reading and reading again the mas¬
terpieces of the past.

Thanking them humbly, we cannot help reflecting
that it was not always so. Once upon a time, we must
believe, there was a rule, a discipline, which controlled
the great republic of readers in a way which is now un¬
known. That is not to say that the great Critic — the
Dryden, the Johnson, the Coleridge, the Arnold — was
an impeccable judge of contemporary work, whose
verdicts stamped the book indelibly and saved the
reader the trouble of reckoning the value for himself.
The mistakes of these great men about their own
contemporaries are too notorious to be worth record¬
ing. But the mere fact of their existence had a central¬
ising influence. That alone, it is not fantastic to sup¬
pose, would have controlled the disagreements of the
dinner-table and given to random chatter about some

[321]

HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY

book just out an authority now entirely to seek. The
diverse schools would have debated as hotly as ever,
but at the back of every reader’s mind would have
been the consciousness that there was at least one
man who kept the main principles of literature closely
in view ; who, if you had taken to him some eccentricity
of the moment, would have brought it into touch with
permanence and tethered it by his own authority in the
contrary blasts of praise and blame.1 But when it
comes to the making of a critic, nature must be gener¬
ous and society ripe. The scattered dinner-tables of
the modern world, the chase and eddy of the various
currents which compose the society of our time, could
only be dominated by a giant of fabulous dimensions.
And where is even the very tall man whom we have
the right to expect1? Reviewers we have but no critic;
a million competent and incorruptible policemen but
no judge. Men of taste and learning and ability are
for ever lecturing the young and celebrating the dead.
But the too frequent result of their able and industrious
pens is a desiccation of the living tissues of literature
into a network of little bones. Nowhere shall we find
the downright vigour of a Dryden, or Keats with his

1 How violent these are two quotations will show. “It [Told by an
Idiot ] should be read as the Tempest should be read, and as Gulliver’s
Travels should be read, for if Miss Macaulay’s poetic gift happens to
be less sublime than those of the author of the Tempest, and if her
irony happens to be less tremendous than that of the author of Gul¬
liver’s Travels, her justice and wisdom are no less noble than theirs.”
— The Daily News.

The next day we read : “For the rest one can only say that if Mr.
Eliot had been pleased to write in demotic English The Waste Land
might not have been, as it just is to all but anthropologists, and
literati, so much waste-paper.” — The Manchester Guardian.

[322]

HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY

fine and natural bearing, his profound insight and
sanity, or Flaubert and the tremendous power of his
fanaticism, or Coleridge, above all, brewing in his
head the whole of poetry and letting issue now and
then one of those profound general statements which
are caught up by the mind when hot with the friction
of reading as if they were of the soul of the book
itself.

And to all this, too, the critics generously agree. A
great critic, they say, is the rarest of beings. But
should one miraculously appear, how should we main¬
tain him, on what should we feed him*? Great critics,
if they are not themselves great poets, are bred from
the profusion of the age. There is some great man to
be vindicated, some school to be founded or destroyed.
But our age is meagre to the verge of destitution.
There is no name which dominates the rest. There is
no master in whose workshop the young are proud to
serve apprenticeship. Mr. Hardy has long since with¬
drawn from the arena, and there is something exotic
about the genius of Mr. Conrad which makes him not
so much an influence as an idol, honoured and admired,
but aloof and apart. As for the rest, though they are
many and vigorous and in the full flood of creative
activity, there is none whose influence can seriously
affect his contemporaries, or penetrate beyond our day
to that not very distant future which it pleases us to
call immortality. If we make a century our test, and
ask how much of the work produced in these days in
England will be in existence then, we shall have to

[323]

HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY

answer not merely that we cannot agree upon the same
book, but that we are more than doubtful whether such
a book there is. It is an age of fragments. A few
stanzas, a few pages, a chapter here and there, the be¬
ginning of this novel, the end of that, are equal to the
best of any age or author. But can we go to posterity
with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those
days, with the whole of literature before them, to sift
our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls? Such
are the questions which the critics might lawfully put
to their companions at table, the novelists and poets.

At first the weight of pessimism seems sufficient to
bear down all opposition. Yes, it is a lean age, we
repeat, with much to justify its poverty; but, frankly,
if we pit one century against another the comparison
seems overwhelmingly against us. Waver ley, The
Excursion, Kubla Khan , Don Juan , ELazlitfs Essays,
Pride and Prejudice, Hyperion, and Prometheus Un¬
bound were all published between 1800 and 1821.
Our century has not lacked industry ; but if we ask for
masterpieces it appears on the face of it that the
pessimists are right. It seems as if an age of genius
must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and
extravagance by cleanliness and hard work. All
honour, of course, to those who have sacrificed their
immortality to set the house in order. But if we ask
for masterpieces, where are we to look? A little
poetry, we may feel sure, will survive; a few poems
by Mr. Yeats, by Mr. Davies, by Mr. De la Mare.
Mr. Lawrence, of course, has moments of greatness,

[324]

HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY

but hours of something very different. Mr. Beerbohm,
in his way, is perfect, but it is not a big way. Passages
in Far Away and Long Ago will undoubtedly go to
posterity entire. Ulysses was a memorable catastrophe
— immense in daring, terrific in disaster. And so,
picking and choosing, we select now this, now that,
hold it up for display, hear it defended or derided, and
finally have to meet the objection that even so we are
only agreeing with the critics that it is an age incapable
of sustained effort, littered with fragments, and not
seriously to be compared with the age that went before.

But it is just when opinions universally prevail and
we have added lip service to their authority that we
become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do
not believe a word that we are saying. It is a barren
and exhausted age, we repeat; we must look back
with envy to the past. Meanwhile it is one of the
first fine days of spring. Life is not altogether lack¬
ing in colour. The telephone, which interrupts the
most serious conversations and cuts short the most
weighty observations, has a romance of its own. And
the random talk of people who have no chance of
immortality and thus can speak their minds out has
a setting, often, of lights, streets, houses, human
beings, beautiful or grotesque, which will weave itself
into the moment for ever. But this is life; the talk
is about literature. We must try to disentangle the
two, and justify the rash revolt of optimism against
the superior plausibility, the finer distinction, of
pessimism.

[325]

HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY

Our optimism, then, is largely instinctive. It springs
from the fine day and the wine and the talk ; it springs
from the fact that when life throws up such treasures
daily, daily suggests more than the most voluble can
express, much though we admire the dead, we prefer
life as it is. There is something about the present
which we would not exchange, though we were offered
a choice of all past ages to live in. And modern
literature, with all its imperfections, has the same hold
on us and the same fascination. It is like a relation
whom we snub and scarify daily, but, after all, cannot
do without. It has the same endearing quality of
being that which we are, that which we have made,
that in which we live, instead of being something,
however august, alien to ourselves and beheld from
the outside. Nor has any generation more need than
ours to cherish its contemporaries. We are sharply
cut off from our predecessors. A shift in the scale —
the war, the sudden slip of masses held in position
for ages — has shaken the fabric from top to bottom,
alienated us from the past and made us perhaps too
vividly conscious of the present. Every day we find
ourselves doing, saying, or thinking things that would
have been impossible to our fathers. And we feel the
differences which have not been noted far more keenly
than the resemblances which have been very perfectly
expressed. New books lure us to read them partly in
the hope that they will reflect this re-arrangement
of our attitude — these scenes, thoughts, and apparently
fortuitous groupings of incongruous things which im-

[326]

HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY

pinge upon us with so keen a sense of novelty — and,
as literature does, give it back into our keeping, whole
and comprehended. Here indeed there is every reason
for optimism. No age can have been more rich than
ours in writers determined to give expression to the
differences which separate them from the past and not
to the resemblances which connect them with it. It
would be invidious to mention names, but the most
casual reader dipping into poetry, into fiction, into
biography can hardly fail to be impressed by the
courage, the sincerity, in a word, by the widespread
originality of our time. But our exhilaration is
strangely curtailed. Book after book leaves us with
the same sense of promise unachieved, of intellectual
poverty, of brilliance which has been snatched from
life but not transmuted into literature. Much of what
is best in contemporary work has the appearance of
being noted under pressure, taken down in a bleak
shorthand which preserves with astonishing brilliance
the movements and expressions of the figures as they
pass across the screen. But the flash is soon over,
and there remains with us a profound dissatisfaction.
The irritation is as acute as the pleasure was intense.

After all, then, we are back at the beginning, vacil¬
lating from extreme to extreme, at one moment en¬
thusiastic, at the next pessimistic, unable to come to
any conclusion about our contemporaries. We have
asked the critics to help us, but they have deprecated
the task. Now, then, is the time to accept their advice
and correct these extremes by consulting the master-

[327]

HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY

pieces of the past. We feel ourselves indeed driven
to them, impelled not by calm judgement but by some
imperious need to anchor our instability upon their
security. But, honestly, the shock of the comparison
between past and present is at first disconcerting. Un¬
doubtedly there is a dullness in great books. There
is an unabashed tranquillity in page after page of
^Wordsworth and Scott and Miss Austen which is
sedative to the verge of somnolence. Opportunities
occur and they neglect them. Shades and subtleties
accumulate and they ignore them. They seem deliber¬
ately to refuse to gratify those senses which are stimu¬
lated so briskly by the moderns; the senses of sight,
of sound, of touch — above all, the sense of the human
being, his depth and the variety of his perceptions, his
complexity, his confusion, his self, in short. There
is little of all this in the works of Wordsworth and
Scott and Jane Austen. From what, then, arises that
sense of security which gradually, delightfully, and
completely overcomes us? It is the power of their
belief — their conviction, that imposes itself upon us.
In Wordsworth, the philosophic poet, this is obvious
enough. But it is equally true of the careless Scott,
who scribbled masterpieces to build castles before
breakfast, and of the modest maiden lady who wrote
furtively and quietly simply to give pleasure. In
both there is the same natural conviction that life is of
a certain quality. They have their judgement of
conduct. They know the relations of human beings
towards each other and towards the universe. Neither

[328]

HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY

of them probably has a word to say about the matter
outright, but everything depends on it. Only believe,
we find ourselves saying, and all the rest will come of
itself. Only believe, to take a very simple instance
which the recent publication of The Watsons brings
to mind, that a nice girl will instinctively try to soothe
the feelings of a boy who has been snubbed at a dance,
and then, if you believe it implicitly and unquestion-
ingly, you will not only make people a hundred years
later feel the same thing, but you will make them feel
it as literature. For certainty of that kind is the condi¬
tion which makes it possible to write. To believe that
your impressions hold good for others is to be released
from the cramp and confinement of personality. It is
to be free, as Scott was free, to explore with a vigour
which still holds us spell-bound the whole world of
adventure and romance. It is also the first step in that
mysterious process in which Jane Austen was so great
an adept. The little grain of experience once selected,
believed in, and set outside herself, could be put pre¬
cisely in its place, and she was then free to make of it,
by a process which never yields its secrets to the
analyst, into that complete statement which is litera¬
ture.

So then our contemporaries afflict us because they
have ceased to believe. The most sincere of them will
only tell us what it is that happens to himself. They
cannot make a world, because they are not free of
other human beings. They cannot tell stories because
they do not believe the stories are true. They cannot

[329]

HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY

generalise. They depend on their senses and emotions,
whose testimony is trustworthy, rather than on their
intellects whose message is obscure. And they have
perforce to deny themselves the use of some of the
most powerful and some of the most exquisite of the
weapons of their craft. With the whole wealth of
the English language at the back of them, they timidly
pass about from hand to hand and book to book only
the meanest copper coins. Set down at a fresh angle
of the eternal prospect they can only whip out their
notebooks and record with agonised intensity the flying
gleams, which light on what? and the transitory splen¬
dours, which may, perhaps, compose nothing what¬
ever. But here the critics interpose, and with some
show of justice.

If this description holds good, they say, and is not,
as it may well be, entirely dependent upon our posi¬
tion at the table and certain purely personal relation¬
ships to mustard pots and flower vases, then the risks of
judging contemporary work are greater than ever be¬
fore. There is every excuse for them if they are wide
of the mark; and no doubt it would be better to re¬
treat, as Matthew Arnold advised, from the burning
ground of the present to the safe tranquillity of the
past. “We enter on burning ground,” wrote Matthew
Arnold, “as we approach the poetry of times so near
to us, poetry like that of Byron, Shelley, and Words¬
worth, of which the estimates are so often not only
personal, but personal with passion,” and this, they
remind us, was written in the year 1880. Beware,

[330]

HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY

they say, of putting under the microscope one inch
of a ribbon which runs many miles; things sort them¬
selves out if you wait; moderation and a study of
the classics are to be recommended. Moreover, life
is short; the Byron centenary is at hand; and the burn¬
ing question of the moment is, did he, or did he not,
marry his sister? To sum up, then — if indeed any
conclusion is possible when everybody is talking at
once and it is time to be going — it seems that it would
be wise for the writers of the present to renounce for
themselves the hope of creating masterpieces. Their
poems, plays, biographies, novels are not books but note¬
books, and Time, like a good schoolmaster, will take
them in his hands, point to their blots and erasions,
and tear them across ; but he will not throw them into
the waste-paper basket. He will keep them because
other students will find them very useful. It is from
notebooks of the present that the masterpieces of the
future are made. Literature, as the critics were saying
just now, has lasted long, has undergone many changes,
and it is only a short sight and a parochial mind that
will exaggerate the importance of these squalls, how¬
ever they may agitate the little boats now tossing out
at sea. The storm and the drenching are on the sur¬
face; and continuity and calm are in the depths.

As for the critics whose task it is to pass judgement
upon the books of the moment, whose work, let us
admit, is difficult, dangerous, and often distasteful, let
us ask them to be generous of encouragement, but spar¬
ing of those wreaths and coronets which are so apt

[33i]

HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY

to get awry, and fade, and make the wearers, in six
months time, look a little ridiculous. Let them take
a wider, a less personal view of modern literature, and
look indeed upon the writers as if they were engaged
upon some vast building, which being built by com¬
mon effort, the separate workmen may well remain
anonymous. Let them slam the door upon the cosy
company where sugar is cheap and butter plentiful,
give over, for a time at least, the discussion of that
fascinating topic — whether Byron married his sister —
and, withdrawing, perhaps, a handsbreadth from the
table where we sit chattering, say something interest¬
ing about literature. Let us buttonhole them as they
leave, and recall to their memory that gaunt aristocrat,
Lady Hester Stanhope, who kept a milk-white horse in
her stable in readiness for the Messiah and was for ever
scanning the mountain tops, impatiently but with confi¬
dence, for signs of his approach, and ask them to follow
her example; scan the horizon; see the past in relation
to the future ; and so prepare the way for masterpieces
to come.

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